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With the release of Imperial Bedroom, Elvis Costello has created one of rock's few legitimately adult records.
Though he's hindered still by the misconception — shared by radio programmers and the public alike — that he's strictly punk, Costello deepens the potential of all popular music with his portrait of a relationship in trouble.
From the husband's first gin-fueled indiscretion to the couple's inevitable and ambiguous attempts at reconciliation, the story is packed with all the ennui, guilt, pain, anger and hope that are at the heart of a marriage gone sour.
As always, Costello shrinks from nothing; in a disturbingly honest sub-theme he accepts responsibility for his failures of manhood while owning up to his wish to escape backward to the protected innocence of youth: "So what if this is a, man's world, I want to be a kid again about it."
In fact, without becoming impossibly Freudian, one must observe that Costello seems a visitor to the bedroom of love. He is, as he says, a "man out of time" — "just a little boy in a big man's shirt."
This is not a happy look at love. It s not that Costello has tried love and found it wanting; it's more to his point that the characters caught up in life's motions so often fail love's difficult and selfless demands.
Imperial Bedroom is among the most ambitious of rock records. Written almost solely by Costello (Squeeze's Chris Difford contributes one tune), Imperial Bedroom is impressively orchestrated by Steve Nieve, piano player in Costello's band, the Attractions. Its production style, which includes strings and horns in addition to the Attractions' basic rock instrumentation, is broader in scope than anything since the Beatles' middle period.
Costello is a gifted lyricist but it takes an effort to penetrate the many levels he works here. The densely layered production obscures lyrics that are difficult from the outset. But the listener who sticks with it (with considerable help from a lyric sheet) will discover qualities of compassion and humility that may come as a surprise from a man who has earned a reputation for venom and willful spite.
"I'm just a mere shadow of my former selfishness," he sings in "Human Hands." And every indication is that as Elvis grows up, so does his music.
Imperial Bedroom is a significant addition to rock's major works.
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