1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 502. Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Imperial Bedroom (1982)

 

The first impression is that it sounds like Elvis Costello is in a good mood – the opening couple of tracks are quite boppy, with some funky organ work on Tears Before Bedtime, and some fun playing with his vocal range on Beyond Belief. If you listen to the lyrics, however, he’s just as disappointed with humanity as he ever was. “So called gentlemen and ladies, dog-fight like rose and thistle” as he sings in Beyond Belief. Tears Before Bedtime disparages women’s tears as a weapon in the battle of the sexes, something that he at least acknowledges to be the fault of both “sides” -  

“Darling, your suspiciousness 
Tortures me at night 
But I can't excuse the cruel words 
That I use whenever we fight” 

Arguably this album belongs to Steve Nieve, providing not only his usual effective piano stylings (a stabbing beat on Shabby Doll for example, or the jazz elements reminiscent of Mike Garson’s work on Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album), but also French accordion on The Long Honeymoon (over a languid bossa nova beat), and orchestral arrangements. 

Man Out Of Time, for example, is a swooping orchestral piece (with the aforementioned Garson-style piano from Nieve) that sounds a little like Squeeze before it abruptly jumps to something more like a John Lennon thrashy piece at the end (returning to an opening motif). This possible Beatles inspiration continues in And In Every Home which has orchestral arrangements that evoke Sergeant Pepper’s combined parade / circus / filmic overture. Perhaps the presence of former Beatles sound engineer, Geoff Emerick, on production duties is partly responsible, but fundamentally everything here comes from Costello and the rest of the Attractions. 

The album gets a bit more conventional in terms of the Attractions’ sound as it goes on, stuffed full of emotionally constipated characters ruining their own lives and those of others by their inability to cope with or articulate the restrictions on their lives. It struck me, listening to it, that although there’s a tendency to disparage the sensibilities, and sensitivities, of Gen Z and the younger generations, there is something to be said for their greater openness and willingness to call out things that they find personally offensive. Is “just deal with it” always useful? Yes, you need the resilience to realise that sometimes the world will make you uncomfortable, but is storing up lingering resentment the way to go? Also the nature of this “battle of the sexes” seems somewhat antiquated (it is, after all, the basis for the tales of the 14th Century’s Decameron) in a world where notions of such a rigid binary division are being challenged. 

For all the problems, and the dying gasp of the old guard, I’d rather live in these times than the past. 

Which is a bit of digression from the album itself; I'd say this was my favourite Costello/Attractions one so far.