imperial bedroom : classic or dud ?

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can't find this in the archive so apologies if it's been done
but this really gets some raves from some quarters doesn't it ?
see i can't really be doing with him, but i heard 'town cryer' and
then 'man out of time' lately and they are both off this and were both ace !
it's recently come out again on a 2-disc-er so...is it a go-er ?

― piscesboy, Friday, 22 August 2003 10:21 (twenty-two years ago)

i love it (and "Trust" even more)

i think Tom did a thread abt 'beyond belief' which possibly also discussed the LP

i haven't seen the 2 disc reissue of this yet, but some of the stuff they're trying to palm off to punters on the bonus discs of other costello LPs was, indeed, "beyond belief". stick to the single-disc version, which you can prolly find really cheap now.

― zebedee (zebedee), Friday, 22 August 2003 11:11 (twenty-two years ago)

On paper I should love it. Has my favourite EC track on ("Beyond Belief"), loads of different styles, "Man Out Of Time", Langer/Winstanley giving it some 80s, chocolate box arrangements, EC on good lyrical form etc etc - but it's never been one of my favourite EC albums, often I've been barely able to get through it. It just doesn't 'hang together' for me I suppose.

― Tom (Groke), Friday, 22 August 2003 11:14 (twenty-two years ago)

it has far too many songs on it, some of them are his best songs (the same problem fucked up get happy! actually)

LPs are in fact actually the bane of Elvis Costello in almost every way: discuss

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 22 August 2003 11:19 (twenty-two years ago)

i think you may be right: i've always gone around saying that this year's model is a great album but despite the fact that i like all but one or two songs on it i just somehow don't enjoy LISTENING to it all the way through.

ec has done like 15 of my favorite songs ever but the rest of his stuff leaves me cold. i keep being tempted to buy punch the clock because "pills and soap" and "shipbuilding" are my favorite ec songs, but i can't get over the dull suspicion that the rest of it will turn out to be a drag.

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Friday, 22 August 2003 11:30 (twenty-two years ago)

here you go: Beyond Belief

― zebedee (zebedee), Friday, 22 August 2003 11:36 (twenty-two years ago)

"Beyond Belief" is amazing, and I really like "And in Every Town." I also like the bonus tracks Ryko tacked on when they reissued it. I like the whole album OK, but it definitely has peaks and troughs. "This Year's Model" I think is pretty great almost all the way through, but I probably still like the greatest hits thing more.

― Tom Breihan (Tom Breihan), Friday, 22 August 2003 11:45 (twenty-two years ago)

I just remembered "Pidgin English" is on Imperial Bedroom, isn't it? That song is amazing, almost as good as "Beyond Belief." And since it isn't on any greatest hits packages or anything, it makes Imperial Bedroom classic all by itself.

― Tom Breihan (Tom Breihan), Friday, 22 August 2003 12:02 (twenty-two years ago)

IF you don't like a lot of EC then it's still worth giving it a go, piscesboy, because it's fairly atypical in terms of arrangements etc.

Some fine songs, but probably not my personal favourite. I can see what mark s is saying about his LPs not being 100% listenable but the exception for me would be King of America.

― James Ball (James Ball), Friday, 22 August 2003 12:41 (twenty-two years ago)

Classic absolutely. I love almost all the songs, and do get the 2 CD reissue - there are 8-track demos of most everything that really reveal the songwriting.

I'm actually not so bummed about these recent 2 CD reissues - they are wonderful. They seem to make the Ryko ones seem like ripoffs, actually. There should also be 1 CD versions for the merely curious.

― southern lights (southern lights), Friday, 22 August 2003 12:46 (twenty-two years ago)

actually i'm not saying that james, exactly, i'm saying that thinking in terms of writing songs to then be ordered on LPs is really fucked w.EC's grasp of what a song is: he is trapped inside a timelocked marketing format => after armed forces he shd have fought to release ALL his songs only as singles and never made LPs... )

(tho i like the barney bubbles sleeve for get happy! a lot, so that wd be a loss in a way)

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 22 August 2003 12:54 (twenty-two years ago)

Are you saying he's writing songs to order for different parts of the album ("Now what can I write to finish side one?") and that's the problem (rather than his songs being indigestible in their current album chunks)?

Funnily enough the copy of Get Happy I first bought had side one and side two the 'wrong' way round and it completely affected the way I perceived the record when I found out.

― James Ball (James Ball), Friday, 22 August 2003 13:08 (twenty-two years ago)

i've always preferred EC in single form, even at the height of my EC listening mania I found Imperial Bedroom close to unlistenable. I liked songs offa it but could never get through the whole album. Also had that same problem with Blood & Chocolate.

King of America is one of the few I can enjoy as an album, everything else has patches that grate on me. Not sure why that is, and EC does tend to be respected as a creator of stong, thematic albums. What is it that the ppl who love the albums get from 'em?

― H (Heruy), Friday, 22 August 2003 13:20 (twenty-two years ago)

2 weird things:

1) I can't imagine EC without the albums to organize him. I love that he tried to create cohesive works, and several of them are near-flawless. I respect the rough patches in the other ones because he's at least semi-successfully maintaining form.

2) I wasn't aware of a pro-King Of America anti-Blood and Chocolate contingent until now. It seems like B&C is thought by a large group to be the last great Costello record.

― southern lights (southern lights), Friday, 22 August 2003 13:29 (twenty-two years ago)

I used to like BaC a lot more - now I find I enjoy KoA a great deal so I suspect I've been recruited to this 'contingent'!

― Tom (Groke), Friday, 22 August 2003 13:32 (twenty-two years ago)

"return to form" alert!!

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 22 August 2003 13:35 (twenty-two years ago)

k-classic. although this is perhaps where elvis's problems with writing out of his vocal range really start to come to the fore. see "kid about it." hard to come up with other objections. i guess i don't love "tears before bedtime," and although "almost blue" is a great song, his version has a little too much fealty to a certain notion of whispered "classiness" (shades of julie london)--i wish he sung it more straight.

― amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 22 August 2003 14:41 (twenty-two years ago)

p.s. tom Langer/Winstanley weren't on this record. Geoff Emerick (the Beatles' engineer) produced it.

― amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 22 August 2003 15:07 (twenty-two years ago)

pretty damn dud. The best songs are on that hits comp. But I don't like much Elvis after This Years Model anyhow. I'm not sure who he's trying to impress.

― Anthony Miccio (Anthony Miccio), Friday, 22 August 2003 15:54 (twenty-two years ago)

what makes you think he's trying to impress people any more than any other musician?

― amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 22 August 2003 16:02 (twenty-two years ago)

his audibly trying/ audibly succeeding ratio is pretty crappy around the Imperial Bedroom era, personally.

― Anthony Miccio (Anthony Miccio), Friday, 22 August 2003 16:09 (twenty-two years ago)

trying for what? for whom?

― amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 22 August 2003 16:13 (twenty-two years ago)

to impress. If there's ever been an artist more desperate to be known as a brilliant wordsmith and complex songwriter/arranger then I don't know about it. A lot of his stuff can be oppressively stuffy. Others may be as guilty but they didn't make albums as good as "This Years Model" beforehand so it doesn't rankle me as much.

― Anthony Miccio (Anthony Miccio), Friday, 22 August 2003 16:15 (twenty-two years ago)

but the problem is the density, not the attempt -> i think there are plenty of songs on IB which if they'd just swarmed piecemeal into the ecology of the charts (uk charts?) of that year they'd have been great, but all crushed together like that it was like instant smart pop just add water only he forgot to include the water

punch the clock was the first EC LP i was actively disappointed by

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 22 August 2003 17:03 (twenty-two years ago)

when I give the album another try I'll take what you're saying into consideration, Mark (do the hits on his '80s albums connect cuz I heard them first on comps or because they're genuinely superior?). Though I may be too much of a water junkie to appreciate it.

― Anthony Miccio (Anthony Miccio), Friday, 22 August 2003 17:13 (twenty-two years ago)

anthony i think you should locate your criticisms in the music and not in some projected notion of what e.c. was thinking when he wrote his songs!

mark that water thing is how i feel about much xtc, and only some costello.

― amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 22 August 2003 17:14 (twenty-two years ago)

The reason I assume he's trying too hard is that I find the lyrics pointlessly verbose and exceptionally clunky. Often the music is too. He SOUNDS like somebody who loves his own wordplay to a fault in the same way you can say Barry Gibb sounds like he's being kicked in the nuts.

― Anthony Miccio (Anthony Miccio), Friday, 22 August 2003 17:19 (twenty-two years ago)

I fucking love this album even though at least 90% of the criticism's I've seen flung at it ring true, I love it nonetheless. I've never liked "A Boy with the Problem", and increasingly I wish there were more songs like at the beginning of side 2 where it sounds like the movie started running out of money and they had to use a cheaper brand of kayo syrup for the blood (on cd it really plays like they're catching their breath after "And In Every Home", which has never sounded like anything more than a pisstake, like they realized Paul McCartney was in the next studio and thought "ooh, what'll the old codge think of this, this'll really make his cards")("ps. I love you"), it could use maybe one more "The Loved One" and one less "Tears Before Bedtime" maybe. It doesn't really sound stuffy to me, it sounds drunk, like EC was soooo happy to be working with Geoff Emerick that he indulged every boyhood fantasy, it's kinda the cousin of Almost Blue, except replace "Nashville" with "Beatles", and make it less reverent and more playful, since the Beatles would be closer to home for EC than Nashville (Almost Blue is a bit of a stuffy record), there's still that sense of 'ooh ooh we're covering George Jone/ripping off "Carry That Weight". EC at his best (choose your breakoff point - 81, 86, whatever) was all about loving the sound of his wordplay (Xgau - "all wordplay as swordplay and puns for punters (one of which means something, one of which doesn't, and both of which took me ten seconds)", I've never been able to figure out which one does and doesn't mean something), the trouble started when he started loving the sound of his voice, it became a bit studied starting slightly around Punch the Clock but really blossoming when he went to Warner Bros., I could barely listen to the Bacharach or the Brodsky Quartet ones as a result). "Shipbuilding" probably does outdo this album in five minutes, the same way some people say "Good Vibrations" outdoes Pet Sounds.

― cinniblount (James Blount), Friday, 22 August 2003 18:49 (twenty-two years ago)

Love it. Crammed full of some of my favorite Elvis songs, most of which have all been talked about already. (But did anyone mention "Human Hands"?) One of my favorite things about this (well, besides the songs), is the lyric sheet. If I'm not mistaken, this was the first time he included one. All the words are words are strung together on the dust jacket, with no punctuation or breaks between the songs. (Without double-checking, I believe they are ALL CAPS, too.) Not only do I love the "here's your fucking lyric sheet, assholes" attitude, but it's actually appropriate for this album, which, in a way, is a great big pile of words all strung together. Or something.

(The Violent Femmes did the same thing a year or so later and credited "EC" with idea.)

― Salmon Pink (Salmon Pink), Friday, 22 August 2003 19:39 (twenty-two years ago)

one month passes...

get happy vs. imperial bedroom ? which is better ?

i like the *idea* of get happy, but i've never heard the tunes.

― piscesboy, Thursday, 25 September 2003 10:59 (twenty-two years ago)

Re. sinkah's comments above - as far as EC's songs are concerned, it's a pity MP3s weren't around quarter of a century ago. Potentially pop's first singer/songwriter/blogger if that had been the case...post a song a day; that would have been ideal

(of course this does not extend to the dreary slop which constitutes "songs" on his new album.

heheh i note that "punch the clock" was nme's album of the year in '83. equivalent of newman's color of money oscar, i.e. he was due one? ("swordfishtrombones" was runner-up).

― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 25 September 2003 11:27 (twenty-two years ago)

More classic than anything else he has ever did. An absolutely classic and perfect pop album. New Wave finally meets musical sophistication and sonic perfection!

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Thursday, 25 September 2003 11:31 (twenty-two years ago)

blount and geir on point,
which is really quite a phrase
when all's said and done/
this to me was craft
in high school when I copped it
on cassette, eight bucks/
to me these songs are
perecquian puzzles to
be put together/
spiky, tense, wrong,
pre-deconstructed things to
mask a shattered heart/
I found teenage love
to be that way too so I
glommed on from the start/
but I also like
punch the clock for sheer pop sheen
that's not cool either!

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Thursday, 25 September 2003 21:15 (twenty-two years ago)

three months pass...

I wasn't aware of a pro-King Of America anti-Blood and Chocolate contingent until now. It seems like B&C is thought by a large group to be the last great Costello record.

i'm neither, i think that they're both crap. punch the clock was EC's last great record.

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 02:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Blood and Chocolate is a horrible bore. I had already begun to lose interest in Costello at this point, but B&C was the last nail in the coffin.

― Sean (Sean), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 02:50 (twenty-two years ago)

"little palaces" is a really great song - so why is the rest of king of america such a hopeless drag?

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 05:59 (twenty-two years ago)

becuz you want NEW WAVE not THE TRUTH.

I have this album, and don't really dislike it; I just never listen to it. I go through phases with EC albums, and they ALWAYS take me a while to fall in love with. So I'll report back later once I've listened again. (this evening, prob.)

― Ian Johnson (orion), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 06:14 (twenty-two years ago)

It includes "Beyond Bellief," right? Thus: CLASSIC!

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 12:53 (twenty-two years ago)

And I think "You Little Fool" is a classic EC single.

― LondonLee (LondonLee), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 13:45 (twenty-two years ago)

"Imperial" has some great stuff on it; "You Little Fool" and "Pidgin English" are fantastic. I was listening to "Armed Forces" the other day, having not heard it for years, and the songs are really nothing for the most part; why not just listen to Abba? Costello tries way too hard and it's a drag. But the playing is something else and apart from "This Year's Model" that's the only thing I really like about those records any more. He wouldn't have been much without the Attractions, I don't think. I believe it was Langdon Winner, writing in Harper's when "Imperial" appeared, who said that EC knew more about music than anyone else who had previously played rock music...and while I do think he knows a lot, I've always found him to be a guy who played at being smart but whose opinions were actually fairly pedestrian. Anyway, if you've ever sat down to play any of EC's tunes, you'll find that he relies on the same tricks in every song, and I think they sound exactly like tricks or mannerisms and not the work of someone really attempting to do something cool with the pop-music format. EC's world is just such an enclosed one--you could say the same thing about Brian Wilson, except that Wilson's stuff does have that certain something else that opens up as opposed to closes you in. Basically, when I hear Elvis Costello now I want to run from the room, another great example of hidden woman-hating and so forth disguised under stupid wordplay and the typically English addiction to "the great tradition of pop music" and all that shit...uncharitable, I suppose, and a bit unfair. When I see EC's mug these days I simply cannot bear it, stop it, man, stop it...

― eddie hurt (ddduncan), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 16:05 (twenty-two years ago)

Haikunym is on some Tanka/Renga shit.

― Mark (MarkR), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 17:02 (twenty-two years ago)

eight years pass...

http://devonrecordclub.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/elvis-costello-imperial-bedroom-round-44-toms-selection/

― yugi ex, Saturday, 12 January 2013 12:39 (thirteen years ago)

what's that a link to

― attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or (thomp), Saturday, 12 January 2013 12:48 (thirteen years ago)

man I am legitimately jealous of the Devon Record Club it is such a cool project. I have dreams of ripping off the idea for my town. Well done you guys for real

― too many encores (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, 12 January 2013 13:38 (thirteen years ago)

Cheers. The best bit is getting to know those bits of your collection that have laid dormant for years (and hearing new stuff)...and the take-away.

― yugi ex, Saturday, 12 January 2013 16:21 (thirteen years ago)

And hearing me say "phenomenological" once a month.

― comedy is unnatural and abhorrent (Scik Mouthy), Saturday, 12 January 2013 19:32 (thirteen years ago)

I know all the EC albums up to and including Imperial Bedroom, and past that I only know various songs. That said, Imperial Bedroom is the tops for me.

― scott pgwp (pgwp), Saturday, 12 January 2013 22:10 (thirteen years ago)

Not played it for years, but used to love it to pieces. The bit that thrilled me the most was the way the thrash intro to Man Out of Time opened out into this stately tempo reminiscent of Like A Rolling Stone

― Dr X O'Skeleton, Sunday, 13 January 2013 18:08 (thirteen years ago)

but used to love it to pieces.

I love it in pieces.

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, 13 January 2013 21:06 (thirteen years ago)

nine years pass...

happy 40th

great album; maybe a bit front-loaded

― mookieproof, Saturday, 2 July 2022 21:07 (three years ago)

but “pidgin english”

― in places all over the world, real stuff be happening (voodoo chili), Sunday, 3 July 2022 00:04 (three years ago)

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