Imperial Bedroom

Produced under the direct supervision of Elvis Costello. Housed in a slim-line package, each rerelease contains a deluxe 28-page booklet with brand-new liner notes by Elvis Costello, rare photos, reproductions of memorabilia, and printed song lyrics. Album includes an entire second disc of bonus material!

Imperial Bedroom was the bridge between Elvis Costello's early rock-oriented records and his later, more musically complex creations. The album found the singer-songwriter trying to approximate the jazz-tinged music of pre-rock Tin Pan Alley composers like the Gershwins and Cole Porter. Whether he completely succeeded is still argued, but the late, great Chet Baker did make the beautiful saloon song "Almost Blue" part of his concert repertoire. Costello's other goal was to capture the lush, symphonic production techniques used by the latter-day Beatles. This he achieved by hiring longtime Fabs engineer Geoff Emerick to produce. The album's first five songs work as an almost seamless suite of music, with "Man Out of Time" standing as one of Costello's most gorgeous compositions. A second disc features alternate takes and singles, including the extra-catchy "Imperial Bedroom," written and recorded after the album's completion. --Bill Holdship

"Masterpiece?" was the word--in Columbia Records' ad campaign, anyway--when Imperial Bedroom appeared in 1982. As the album plays, though, the emphasis occasionally seems better placed on the question mark. This is a very good, sometimes dazzling album, but as a heart-wrencher it holds not a candle to King of America, and as a singular example of elegant pop craft it can't top Costello's 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory (not too shabby as a heart-wrencher itself, come to think of it). Of course, there are plenty of small miracles, and one huge one in the mind-bending "Beyond Belief." Imperial Bedroom is gorgeous more often than not, but in a way, there's more heart in the simple Smokey Robinson and the Miracles cover, "From Head to Toe," that appeared as a single later that year. --Rickey Wright