Editorial Reviews Working with new producer (and former Beatles engineer) Geoff Emerick, Costello and the Attractions approached this as a full-blown studio...
Imperial Bedroom
Music Review:
Music Review
Dondestan: Revisited [Original recording remastered]
Fährmann: Eighth Sonata; Wagner: Meistersinger-Triptych
Exceptionally Remixed [Import]
GHV2 (Limited Edition) [Limited Edition]
Amazon.com essential recording
"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 appears as a bonus track on the Rykodisc edition. --Rickey Wright
From the Label
By far the most ambitious album of Elvis Costello's early stretch, IMPERIAL BEDROOM was originally advertised, much to Costello's embarrassment, in a campaign featuring the word "masterpiece." Yet numerous critics have used that very word to describe this album, which introduced timeless items like "Shabby Doll," "Beyond Belief" and "Man Out of Time."