"I'll do anything to confuse the enemy." If Elvis Costello had a business card, those words (from "The Beat") would be on it, the equivalent of Paladin's "Have Gun Will Travel." Costello doesn't go on to tell us who the enemy is because he doesn't have to. He has made it clear from the first that he doesn't trust anyone entirely—the British government, the music industry, his fans, his lovers, least of all himself. These are the armed forces that the title of his new album is referring to. If Costello is not quite as belligerent on Armed Forces as he was on his previous two albums, the title announces that he still sees the world in terms of power. It's this fascination with power—more than his command of metaphor and image, more than his piercing moodiness—that makes the comparisons with Dylan apt for once. For Costello, everything is always personal, which means that while he is occasionally petty he is never cold-blooded, and that he's capable of identifying with his adversaries. On Armed Forces his use of "you" and "I" has become increasingly blurred, so much so that half the time it is impossible to figure out whether he's lashing himself or someone else. While this makes the album his most ambiguous, it also makes it his most generous….

Costello has always been drawn to apocalyptic language and Armed Forces is no exception ("But you'll never get them to make a lamp shade out of me," he sings in "Goon Squad"). But what seems to frighten him in "Accidents Will Happen" is that his world doesn't explode but erodes away: "It's the damage that we do—and don't know / The words that we don't say that scare me so."

The mixed contexts that run through the rest of Armed Forces seem both to embody the danger Costello articulates here and to attempt to defeat it. The most overtly political songs ("Senior Service," "Oliver's Army") speak with the abrasive intimacy of a lover's quarrel; the most explicit love songs are cast in political terms…. In the case of "Green Shirt" the lyrics are so open-ended that the song is either an elaborate sexual fantasy or a meditation on paranoia—or both. If Costello's language is rich with puns ("guilty party girl") and cliche-reversal ("You're mind is made up, but your mouth is undone"), it is also studded with non sequiturs and slurred phrases, a situation exacerbated by the numerous British references. But Costello has always understood that rock and roll language can be vague as long as its tone isn't….

CBS would like to tell you that Costello has become more accessible. And even he admits in "Big Boys" that he's beginning to "function in the usual way." But don't let either one of them fool you. Whatever concessions Costello has made on Armed Forces are only to confuse the enemy.