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Painted From Memory
Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach
Brett Milano
 
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Like Elvis Costello's collaborations with Paul McCartney and the Brodsky Quartet, Painted from Memory sounds better on paper than it does on disc. It was obviously conceived as a pop album in the classic sense, a lost-love cycle in the vein of Frank Sinatra's Only the Lonely, but it lacks the essential elements of classic pop: memorable tunes and heart. Burt Bacharach's '60s breeziness is echoed only in a few stray melodic hits, which may well be Costello's doing; the rest is resoundingly unhummable. Costello's lyrics hammer away at the same dark angle — heartbreak in an empty house, heartbreak at a birthday party, heartbreak in Toledo. And the arrangements hang ornate bits on songs that call for directness, an example being the falsetto chorus and weighty bridge applied to "God Give Me Strength." Worse, the stilted vocals that turned up on the semi-classical Juliet Letters make a return here; the understatement of Costello's earlier ballads is long gone. Save for 1994's underrated Brutal Youth, this continues to be a frustrating decade for Elvis fans.
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