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Burt Bacharach's music makes for great soundtracks, and there's a certain Muzak charm about some of his hits. But, essentially, he writes flaccid music for flaccid people. As such, the much-touted Bacharach/Elvis Costello teaming, despite a few genuine beauts, seems to bring out the most tepid in the usually magnificent Costello. Unfortunately, he seems unable to inspire his partner.
Costello has leaned more and more on lush arrangements as his career has evolved. On his stellar 1996 album All This Useless Beauty, he reached something of a peak in this respect. Songs such as the languid "Poor Fractured Atlas" and the soul-infused "Why Must a Man Stand Alone" expertly mixed Costello's lyric flourish with rich melodies while avoiding the cloying and the cliched. But on Memory he seems to be writing down to the music, or, as a fellow Costello-phile proffered, perhaps he's writing simpler and more universally. Whichever, he's ended up pennings songs such as "I Still Have That Other Girl," combining a catchy hook with merely pedestrian lyrics.
That's the case with many of the other tracks on Memory. "This House Is Empty Now," "My Thief," and the title track float on facile, ultimately forgettable melodies with equally uninspired lyrics. Bacharach might be comfortable with that — he has built his career on such dreck — but Costello, one of the finest songwriters in the post-Tin Pan Alley era of pop music, has always managed much more, even at his least inspired.
This journey into the innocuous isn't without its high points. "Toledo," with its Bacharach trademark sad-sack horn, is an achingly adult twist on betrayal. "It's no use saying that I love you / And that girl really didn't mean a thing to me" says more in a line than other Memory tracks do in their entirety. Another broken bond fuels "The Sweetest Punch," a shimmering gem in which Bacharach steps up his lithe melody-making to great multilayered effect, and the duo's first-ever collaboration "God Give Me Strength" (from the movie Grace of My Heart) is as compelling and empathetic closing out this album as it was in the movie.
The most consistently impressive thing about this collaboration — if there is anything here that impresses — is Costello's voice: nimble, impassioned, and committed on virtually every cut. He effectively stretches his very limited range to wrest at least a modicum of genuine emotion from the album's often sterile musical surroundings. Still, while Costello's voice salvages many songs, it is not enough to save Painted From Memory from underachieving.
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