You rarely see them compared to each other, but Elvis Costello and David Bowie aren’t exactly polar opposites. They’re both notoriously restless, eager to try any musical genre that their muses may be drawn to. They’ve each assumed and discarded personas with neck-snapping rapidity. They’ve changed their names, sometimes more than once. Costello would like you to forget he was ever angry; Bowie would like you to forget he was ever bi. They both have new albums out now, recorded in and evocative of New York City.

Lately, Costello's probably had it harder. David Lee Roth famously, glibly said that rock critics like Elvis Costello because he looks like them. Ever since the '90s (at least), he's been looking more like a punching bag. No other artist has so thoroughly pissed people off by getting bored with new wave and developing some ensuing pretensions. Curiously, Costello's new album, North (Deutsche Grammophon), drops some of the pretensions, but not the right ones. A song cycle about loves dying and born anew, North is a fairly brief collection of piano ballads, framed in delicate classical and jazz echoes. Costello strips away all the diffuse allusions that have characterized his lyrics in the past, and delivers without a doubt his most restrained vocal performance ever. The album would probably cast quite a spell if it weren't bludgeoning the listener with Tastefulness.

For years, fans like me have been swearing that Costello's our George Gershwin (or one of them). North proves that he's not. Virtually every time he flirts with an evocative torch melody here, some knotty, difficult chord progression wanders in, like a most unwelcome fog. Only "Still" and "Can You Be True?" feel like memorable, seamless songs. North resembles Costello's '98 collaboration with Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory. Only that album was shot through with Costello's true modus operandi: passion. His best ruminations on that seasick feeling we call love, Imperial Bedroom (1982) and Blood & Chocolate (1986), are extreme, passionate records. The overwrought vocals and excess verbiage are the calling cards of a man pushing himself to his breaking point, so he can ensure that he will never, ever forget what it's like to feel something. How can the singer on North -- hardly bothering to raise his voice or find a metaphor more potent than the weather for falling in and out of love -- compare?

Even putting aside his past oeuvre, North just isn't much fun to listen to. Not so Bowie's Reality (ISO/Columbia). Veering ever so slightly from the airy brooding of last year's fine Heathen, Bowie brings along his band this time. Not for nothing: The album is accompanied by his most extensive tour since 1990. On Reality, wanky prog-metal guitars -- a Bowie Achilles' heel for some time -- intrude occasionally, as do some dated synthesizers. But it feels honest; it's not like the Thin White Duke fell to Williamsburg all of a sudden. More importantly, Bowie is energized by this music, and thus connected to it. His ruminations on love and mortality on, respectively, "Days" and "Never Get Old" have real pathos. Several numbers, like the stomping title track and lead-off "New Killer Star," find him still getting off on his beloved Velvet Underground rhythmic vroom. Like Costello, Bowie is in fine voice here, but in his case it's not just a matter of tone and breath control. On two ballads -- "The Loneliest Guy" and a cover of George Harrison's religious-minded "Try Some, Buy Some" -- his weathered croon adds an ambiguity that's not cheap irony, but something close to, well, reality.

There's no guarantee Bowie won't lose the plot again, though he'll probably find a new way to do so. And Costello could very well detour completely from North's somnambulant sound next time, and pull it off. Both have darted back and forth across the pop landscape, sometimes thrillingly, other times out of desperation. They're worth keeping an eye on; you never know what they'll do next. Boys, keep swinging.