Review of Painted From Memory New York Observer, 1998-09-10 PAINTED BY COSTELLO AND BACHARACH By Jim Windolf Following the commercial failure of his gorgeous 1996 album, All This Useless Beauty, Elvis Costello returns to the pop-music marketplace with a new record label ... a new manager ... and a new songwriting and production partner (Burt Bacharach). [Radio City date stuff snipped] So how's the new record? Great. The melodies are complex and insanely catchy; the lyrics, written by Mr. Costello, deal uniformly with love gone terribly wrong, and sound as if they might have been written by Cyrano de Bergerac. Painted from Memory was recorded in Hollywood, with a 24-piece orchestra conducted by Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Costello sings in the grand, direct style he has used on ballads throughout the '90s. The pairing may seem like a stunt, but Mr. Costello's aim is true: He performed Bacharach songs in concert as early as 1977, and he has said that one of his signature titles, "Accidents Will Happen" from 1979, is built on an inversion of a Bacharach chord progression. The two make a nice team because Mr. Bacharach is an L.A. guy, smooth and untortured, and Mr. Costello is still the stormy, agitated fellow we have grown to know and love. Mr. Costello's mission was to take from Mr. Bacharach his genius for distinctive pop melodies, while leaving behind his elder's schmaltzy tendencies. With the exception of a hack guitar solo on one song and a fluffy drum sound on another-- both of which would sound more at home on a Christopher Cross record--his success was total. Painted from Memory is passionate, Romantic with a capital R, and it's the right record for the long-shadows melancholy of autumn in Manhattan.