"This Year's Model"—and it's difficult to believe from the maturity of the writing and the performance that it's only The Man's second album!—is an achievement so comprehensive, so inspired, that it exhausts superlatives. It promotes its author to the foremost ranks of contemporary rock writers. Clear out of sight of most of his rivals and comparisons….

Elvis Costello's prodigious talent, we can see in retrospect, was only superficially exposed on his first album.

While it is true that "Aim's" specific themes of revenge, jealousy, infidelity, deceit and betrayal are central to this album's most powerful songs—"Lip Service," "Lipstick Vogue" and "Living In Paradise"—these obsessions are forced even more ruthlessly into the spotlight.

And, running parallel to these preoccupations, is the vague paranoia and unease of "The Beat" and "Night Rally" which hardens to vicious attack on "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea," a...