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Cabaret singing is one of the most venerable of pop idioms, yet one fraught with some paradoxical pitfalls: betraying emotional candor, yet not the studied artifice of the singer. And while Elvis Costello has a long and successful flirtation with the style, he's seldom delivered it with the consistently stripped-down directness he's mustered here. Costello claims the alum's songs bubbled forth nearly fully-formed over the winter of ‘02-‘03, and indeed they often ebb and flow with an unpredictable fluidity that seems to reflect the songwriter's subconscious mind (to the point of occasionally conjuring fleeting, almost spectral melodic references from his beloved pop standards) at its most creatively naked. For an artist who's long prided himself on the willful literacy and challenging symbolism of his lyrics, the transparency of his romantic musings here is often startling. Likely inspired by an arc of emotional change in his own life (Costello hints that the bittersweet "You Left Me in the Dark" and hopefulness "I'm in the Mood Again" don't bookend the album by coincidence), a subtext of difficult romantic communication also surfaces repeatedly on tracks like the dramatic "Someone Took the Words Away" and lovely "When it Sings," while the neo-classicism of "Still" reunites Costello with the Brodsky Quartet in arguably the album's most traditional, sophisticated moment. Backed by Steve Nieve's spare, haunting piano (the instrument the songwriter composed the songs at; it's the most guitar-free album of his career), the drums of Peter Erskine, and double-bass of Mike Formanek, with only the most economic of orchestral flourishes, the mood is decidedly autumnal, Costello's gently quavering voice pushed into the spotlight as never before, a musical tightrope walk whose sublime execution seldom belies its conceptual audacity. --Jerry McCulley