Stanford Daily, October 5, 1982

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'Bedroom' forecast: fair and partly cloudy


Tony Kelly

Elvis Costello
Imperial Bedroom

"History repeats the old conceits / The glib replies, the same defeats."

OK, so forget about Nick Lowe. Forget about James Brown, the Motown sound, and especially "Watching the Detectives." George Jones, who's he? Elvis Costello doesn't want to be like any of those folks.

Elvis. Costello wants to grow up to be just like his dear old dad.

For those of you too hip to read Rolling Stone, here's a little history. Ross MacManus, father of Declan (aka EC), was a cabaret singer in England for about 20 years. Hell, he may still be around, for all it matters to you and me. But for dutiful son Elvis, following in his father's footsteps in the slightly more profitable world of rock music, the past matters a lot. On Imperial Bedroom, his latest album, Costello begs, borrows and steals from a whole field of musical straws, mostly remnants of his own career. The result isn't bad, after you factor in some style points for sheer diversity. But at the same time, the album seems malnourished, especially in the light of a bunch of well-fed previous albums.

"Giving you more of what for always worked for me before."

If Elvis Costello's career hadn't seemed curiously self-defeating to you before, then you're the kind of person who bets on Sisyphus. From his notorious early days as the Angry Young Wimp of skinny-tie English rock to his later whirls in the Fat, Dumb and Happy school of country music, Costello has rarely been content with playing to an audience's taste. Even a relatively tame song like "Clubland" on 1981's Trust has a particular resonance to him, and apparently to himself alone. The last three times Costello has visited this coast, he used the same arrangement and lighting effects for the song, altering it only to heighten the smoky barroom drama of the piece. This consistency, rare for Costello, is a hint to the ambitions revealed on Bedroom — a sometimes awkward, but steady progression away from rock raveups and toward a dramatic, piano-laden style somewhere between Tin Pan Alley and Danny Marona at the local Marriott.

"Almost blue / Almost doing things we used to do / There's a girl here and she's almost you."

Of course, there are some heavy prices to be paid for the heavy poses Elvis strikes in Imperial Bedroom. To begin with, the torrents of words flung at the listener from the recesses of Costello's mouth, tantalizingly incoherent in many earlier works, are now spelled out a little too clearly. Despite all the passion and vocal gymnastics of the songs — and make no mistake, the record is beautifully sung — it seems that Costello is no longer singing about anything, least of all himself. "Tears Before Bedtime," a fun song with an unstoppable Temptations chorus/fadeout, points out the necessity in Costello's songs to fill up available rhythms with words, regardless of their propriety. "The Long Honeymoon" is the worst offender, combining a cheesy Wurlitzer "jazz" rhythm line with a pseudo-George Jones dramatic sense. Both styles leave me cold.

Perhaps the key to the mystery lies in the lack of mystery; the lyric sheet (a first on a Costello album) is too precise, typed out to catch every pun, every wordplay that individually seems catchy but adds up to a general malaise on Imperial Bedroom.

"So what if this is a man's world / I want to be a kid again about it."

The lack of interest in the words of Elvis Costello is redoubled by the surprising production on the album. Back when Nick Lowe and Costello had a mutual admiration society going, the former's pop sensibilities kept a lid on things going too far afield. And Costello seems to have learned his share from the alliance; "Man Out of Time" has been getting some airplay on AM radio (KFRC, no less), and you've got to love a song about murder and espionage with "Cruel to Be Kind" tambourines in the background.

But by and large, there's a heck of a lot of piano tinkling on Bedroom, and the threat of losing a bottom end to the mix is averted only by Bruce Thomas' agile bass playing. In fact, this album marks the best playing by the Attractions in at least a couple of years, possibly their best work yet; unfortunately, the outstanding moments are all buried in the introductions and the fadeouts to the songs. "Beyond Belief," "Shabby Doll," "Man Out of Time," "The Loved Ones," and "Pidgin English" all have terrific riffs in them somewhere, but producer Geoff Emerick and Costello couldn't have done a better job of stamping them out with a sledgehammer, throwing little production effects and gimmickry to distance themselves from the songs. All of a sudden, we're back to the Sisyphus syndrome.

"Other boys use the splendor of their trembling lip / They're so teddy bear tender and tragically hip."

Of course, it's far from reasonable to assume that Elvis and the boys should spend their time trying to be sincere in a business that rates about a 9.7 on the Fake-O-Meter. And for Costello, this type of artifice is probably a more personal form of expression than any single song he's written; he clearly loves the form of music he's performing right now, and he certainly has a load of musical tradition behind him (regardless of old Papa MacManus). What's more, the record seems to be a bona fide hit, currently sitting in the Top 10 of most record bins. However, there's a definite feeling of fatigue lurking around the end of Imperial Bedroom; not from the expense of too much energy, but from tiring of a game that's gone on too long. Elvis Costello is clearly settled into Long-Term-Artist-land, and that's alright — the problem is that in doing so, the fog that surrounds him seems to have stagnated.

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The Stanford Daily, October 5, 1982


Tony Kelly reviews Imperial Bedroom.

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1982-10-05 Stanford Daily page 09 clipping 01.jpg
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Page scan.
1982-10-05 Stanford Daily page 09.jpg

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