Spike

Back in our tenth anniversary issue, Elvis Costello was explaining why "I would rather be a folk musician than a teen idol". That squares with any early critical read-out on Spike. If it isn't exactly his own tribute to the rhythms and regimes of the world, Spike nonetheless is an album of musical exploration and diversification which both flexes disused musical muscles and restlessly refuses to settle in any single slot.

Clocking in at an almost spendthrift 60 minutes 21 seconds – and that, bargain-hunters doesn't include the extra CD/cassette track, 'Coal Train Robbery' – and recorded with an assortment of musicians in Dublin, Los Angeles, London and New Orleans, 'Spoke' is like one of those over-generous multi-course Chinese banquets that don't allow easy digestion. Furthermore all this globe-trotting with its variety of local flavours – jazz, Irish, trad, crescent city funk and waspish keyboard pop to name the most tangible – also means Spike lacks any common thread, any single immediately identifying sound to guide you through its maze.

Costello just isn't trying to claim or capture any particular pop territory. Instead taking 'album' in its original meaning as a collection, a bagatelle, 'Spike' could just be his own 'White Album', a record which lets each song dictate its own code and colour, veering from the essentially sell-made acoustic 'Baby Plays Around' to the lavish Gothic melodrama of 'Miss MacBeth' with its twenty-four separate instruments.

So while some songs immediately startle, others shyly malinger at the back of the queue. Much as I appreciate Allen Toussaint's warm piano and the Dirty Dozen Brass band on 'Deep Dark Truthful Mirror'. I'm flummoxed by its obscure last verse, while Costello's preference to play the objective story-teller leaves me searching for the emotional focus of 'Chewing Gum'. 'Satellite' too takes time though it's blessed by a swaying chorus harmonized by Chrissie Hynde at her most Junoesque.

Certainly on 'Spike', Costello enjoys playing virtuoso as the jack of all musical parades and trades, even leading off the second side with an instrumental, 'Stalin Malone'. But 'Spike' will score most smartly for Irish ears when he tackles and toys with traditional music. As with 'Any King's Shilling', his reflection on his soldier grand-father who got caught on the wrong side of 1916. Yet both this and 'Tramp The Dirt Down' are coloured by a jazz inflection – Costello's personal musical manifesto will always unapologetically acknowledge both Christy Moore and Charles Mingus – which show his technical-skill in both subduing and harnessing styles, other lesser writers would find mutually incompatible.

That cunning means 'Tramp The Dirt Down' is no crude protest song or anti-Thatcher rant. It isn't just that he sings "When England was the whore of the world/Margaret was her madam", it's how he sings it, caressing that damning couplet like a regretful poisoner's kiss. As with ‘Shipbuilding’, there's a sense of the embitteredly elegiac, a feeling that mere vituperation is not enough and he also widens the song out into an indictment of any war-monger who "takes all the glory and none of the shame".

'Last Boat Leaving' and 'Baby Plays Around' will also be shoehorned into that same acoustic cabaret mode though the former, a leftover from 'The Courier', has Costello and fellow producers, T-Bone Burnett and Kevin Kileen, having some mild psychedelic fun with the vocal echoes. As for the self-explanatory 'Baby Plays Around' it must be the most starkly bereft and disconsolate track on Spike, further proof of how the range of his singing has developed through the last decade.

Because Spike is a Costello show of many voices. The blistering 'Let It Dangle', his tirade against capital punishment, already ferociously previewed on The Season, spits gall ad acid yet he can then switch makes to be archly and teasingly malevolent on 'God's Comic'.

That song can be entered on many levels – as a deft wind-up of shamelessly trendy clerics; as a salvo against those philistines who sit "reading an airport novelette, listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Requiem" that perfectly nails the yob crassness of the enterprise culture; or finally as the glum true confession of a grumpy and disillusioned God who now figures he "should have given the world to the monkeys". Yet musically, it's always tantalizing, sounding as if written in the afterglow of his collaboration with Paul McCartney with a playfully jazzy and vaudevillian chorus that's typically softshoe Macca yet drained of any charming, cloying facility through its "Now I'm dead… I was scared" refrains. All of which makes 'God's Comic' the most achieved advance on this album of experiment.

And though less weighty and ambitious, the two McCartney collaborations also work, 'Pads, Paws and Claws' being another scampishly syncopated parable of marital claustrophobia while 'Veronica' is a reminder of both partners' abilities to join an insightful character sketch to purring pop.

We've got far away from the jazz and the trad, an indication of just how Spike ranges. Indeed 'Miss MacBeth' uses both the Dirty Dozen crew and his Irish aides like Davy Spillane and Steve Wickham strictly for spooky sound affects and again as a sinister fairground organ brays in the background, like 'Veronica', it's about an older woman who's not all her image seems.

But if 'Miss MacBeth' is the most playful track – the artist at recreation – "…This Town…" compounds the impression of the artist as moralist, angered at the now unashamed cruelties of the new self-made breed who can claim unabashed, "you're nobody 'till everybody in this town things you're a bastard". The typical creatures of societies that now almost glory in being publicly red and raw in tooth and claw.

So ultimately Spike is an occasionally disjointed survey, a panorama of people and music that refuses easy and early framing and that finds Costello stretching towards and usually firmly grasping a new set of tools and artistic rules. Given the time and care he put into its creation, you'll soon find this Spike you'll like.