Costello is the press agent's dream: a galvanic artist whose screwball appearance only heightens the force of his debut album, "My Aim Is True." If he appears to suffer from temporal dislocation, the visual symptoms only reinforce his music's rock classicism….

His songs are ripe with a sense of history and a barbed wit, but he is neither a nostalgic impersonator nor a parodist. Visual and musical echoes of the '50s and '60s are undeniably there, but as a singer and writer, he appears to have absorbed his influences enough to obscure any singular models….

Nor does Costello typify New Wave's assumed flamboyant primitivism…. [Both] playing and songwriting attest to a melodic sense forged directly from the best rock and pop sources. Welcome to the Working Week, which opens the album, may carry a scathing contempt for middle-class verities, but it rocks like crazy and even...