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On the back cover of Elvis Costello's new album, Imperial Bedroom (Columbia), the British singer-songwriter wears an old-fashioned straw boater, as though he was hoping to pass for Hoagy Carmichael. Inside, there are 15 songs that suggest that Carmichael's warm corn isn't nearly ambitious enough for Costello: On Imperial Bedroom, he aspires to being nothing less than a new-wave Cole Porter.
He fails, of course. Imperial Bedroom doesn't offer a single idea that Costello hasn't had before. There's an endless procession of "I love you, I hate you, I love / hate you" lyrics, and his pronouncements are unnecessarily convoluted.
About a year ago, on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow show, Costello said he'd always been a big fan of pop songwriters of the '20s and '30s, but from the evidence of Imperial Bedroom, he became too obsessed with the clever wordplay that characterized the best pop songs of those eras.
Earlier Elvis Costello albums have contained some of the most intricate lyrics in rock-music history, nearly all of them shiveringly precise and wracked with emotion. Like the best puzzles, you could solve the meaning of a verse without destroying its allusive magic.
When, on Get Happy!! (1979), Costello balefully crooned "Now my whole world goes from blue to blue," his voice cracking as he struggled past the second "blue," it didn't matter that the line didn't make much sense. It carried a wealth of romance and sadness: It made emotional sense.
But the new album lacks this sort of emotional truth. All is artifice, and the passion sounds forced for the sake of a clever twist of phrase or a clotted pun.
For example, here are three lines from "Beyond Belief": "This battle with the bottle is nothing so novel / So in this almost empty gin palace / Through a two-way looking glass you see your Alice." The literary references in this passage are painfully obvious, overused ones. The pun of "novel" is too immediately discovered by the listener to be of any surprise or amusement. In song after song, Costello forces you to become nothing more than a picky English teacher, grading his self-conscious compositions.
Until recently, Elvis Costello was the best songwriter in rock 'n' roll, and so recklessly prolific — seven albums released within four years — that he seemed a heroic artist as well. Certainly he was often petulant and mean-spirited, both in his lyrics and in his live performances, but his art was so subtle and witty that his crankiness merely added to his allure.
But Costello's last album, his ponderous excursion into country music, Almost Blue (1981), was a melancholy drag, and now on Imperial Bedroom he seems to have spent so much time on the complex lyrics that he failed to write attractive melodies around his words.
There are clever orchestrations courtesy of Costello and Steve Nieve, the keyboard player in Costello's back-up band, the Attractions. These pretty string and horn arrangements frame the rock 'n' roll instrumentation provided by the Attractions in a fresh, novel way. But the tunes drag and disappear entirely whenever Costello wants to make some tiresome literary point. He's become too subtle for his own good.
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