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When Elvis Costello played New York's Palladium Theater last New Year's Eve, his audience listened almost politely as he twanged out songs from Almost Blue, his unwelcome country record. Badly produced by Nashville's Billy Sherill, the record cost Costello a bushel of fans. Long-timers feared their Elvis, the skinny kid who stood contorted on the cover of My Aim Is True, had lost his verve. So when Costello told the crowd he was about to play a new song from a new record, his sixth album of originals in five years, everyone was listening for the pedal steel guitar again.
What came out instead was "Shabby Doll," an eerie mixture of ballad and bop that chronicled Costello's loss of yet another woman and put him back on track with old fans. Now that the pressure is on Costello to be the new Cole Porter, as the NY Times' Robert Palmer has suggested, as well as the old Elvis Costello, he's come up with a record that proves he's a little bit of both.
Imperial Bedroom is a transition album with more hits than misses. Costello tosses about literary catch-phrases in "Beyond Belief" his most sophisticated song since "Clubland" ("in this almost empty gin palace / through a two-way looking glass you see your Alice"). He experiments with his voice in the ballad "Almost Blue," a well-crooned torch song, and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in "Town Cryer" and "...And In Every Home." Although these experiments don't always succeed ("Town Cryer" is soppy), they're always interesting. The album rolls through 15 songs with sensible ease. Most of the anger is gone, but the inventiveness remains, and is refined.
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