Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Imperial Bedroom

"Masterpiece?" was the word--in Columbia Records' ad campaign, anyway--when Imperial Bedroom appeared in 1982. As the album plays, though, the emphasis occasionally seems better placed on the question mark. This is a very good, sometimes dazzling album, but as a heart-wrencher it holds not a candle to King of America, and as a singular example of elegant pop craft it can't top Costello's 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory (not too shabby as a heart-wrencher itself, come to think of it). Of course, there are plenty of small miracles, and one huge one in the mind-bending "Beyond Belief." Imperial Bedroom is gorgeous more often than not, but in a way, there's more heart in the simple Smokey Robinson and the Miracles cover, "From Head to Toe," that appeared as a single later that year. --Rickey Wright Amazon.com essential recording

A great album revisited!

Imperial Bedroom is an album that has Elvis Costello ( Declan MacManus) at the top of his game as a songwriter. It's true that the album contains very few of his hits but every song is good regardless. What I find striking about Imperial Bedroom is how many different styles EC attempts to write in, we get Jazz ( Almost Blue ), Pop ( The Loved Ones ) Surrealist Rhyme ( Man out of Time ) it almost like a `master-class' in post Beatles songwriting. By the end of the album (I would say the last 7 songs) each song tops the last getting more and more melodious and clever until a wonderful crescendo with Town Crier, one of my all time favorite album closers. Beautiful! The band is also in top form with Steve Naive creating some the best arrangements in rock since the Beatles Abbey Road (comparison intended). To make things even more Beatlesque and masterful the album was produced by Geoff Emerick, the Beatles engineer from many of their masterworks. Of course the strings on And in every Home are great but I really love his piano playing on The Loved Ones. Whenever I hear that track I am reminded of the Scherzo from Schubert's Trout Quintet which Naive may have been quoting musically.

Pigeon English is another more recent favorite of mine off Imperial Bedroom. Songs like that one and Human Hands seem to have Costello penning lyrics right out the Cole Porter scrapbook. There is so much wit and edge and pop-sensibility here it is no wonder that Paul McCartney employed Costello to co-write on a few of his albums in the late 80's-early 90's. If you're a music fan and fan of great song craft Imperial Bedroom is a must listen. Another sidebar: It was reported that Ira Gershwin actually checked out Imperial Bedroom and was impressed. Amazing, right?! That must have went right to EC's head.


September 11, 2008

Elvis shatters the expectations

When "Imperial Bedroom" first hit the shelves, critics were falling over themselves with superlatives. Even Columbia's "Artist...Masterpiece?" ad campaign was begging the question. Was this the album that would crack the new wave stereotype that had been hung around Elvis Costello's neck since "My Aim Is True?"
The answer was yes...and no.

Granted, hiring Geoff Emerick to put his Beatle-esque touches made for a handsome, rich sound, more than any other album in EC's discography. The expansiveness paid off right from the album's opener, "Beyond Belief." Toying with his own range and the overlapping vocal parts, Elvis' willingness to experiment rocked the foundations of all the early "punks" of the period. (Think of how closely Joe Jackson's "Night And Day" and The Police's "Synchronicity" followed.) The experiments were also inherent to the arrangements. The high pitched strings that slip out of the album's fade to "Town Cryer" were four cellos overdubbed to sound like an entire string section, as I recall.

Working from the pretext that they could experiment like the Beatles did, each song was tinkered and toyed with till (as you can hear in the comparisons to the bonus disc's demo versions) they barely resembled their original ideas. It made the original album's side one a song suite of near "Sgt. Pepper" proportions, with the standout of "Man Out Of Time" marking the perfect bridge between the Elvis of old and the Elvis of new. His anguished howl that breaks the song open and then ushers it into the heartbreak of "Almost Blue" reset the boundaries of compositions in 1982.

Comparisons to Gershwin and Porter were also being tossed around when "Imperial Bedroom" first came out, one suspects they had more to do with overzealous critics trying to make associations with "serious music" than to the obvious merits of Elvis' songwriting prowess. The debt to Tin Pan Alley ("The Long Honeymoon") is truly there. But the lyrical jabs and jibes are still pure Costello, and a line like "In a private detective overcoat and dirty deadman's shoes" would be perfect for that kind of stage production cross. I'd be hard pressed to imagine Cole Porter working up the anger behind "Shabby Doll."

In short, the dark and introspective "Imperial Bedroom" was a turning point for Elvis, final proof that he was at the crest of the still expanding wave of British writers that had begun emerging in the early 80's. It was likely the best album of 1982 as well. May 5, 2007

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