Elvis Costello emerged out of London as post- punk's angry young anti- hipster over twenty years ago. As a tribute to his craftsmanship, he's managed to face the dilemma of artistic growth versus fan expectation as well as anyone during that period. Costello has always placed the quality and ingenuity of his songs ahead of their treatment and genre, exploring Stax Volt R+B, country and even chamber music on a whim with better than average success. While these projects have not always been the highlights of his career, they've certainly kept it interesting. The latest stop on that twisted road he travels is 1998's collaboration with Burt Bacharach, Painted From Memory.

Bacharach, as we all know, is the famous songsmith of a number of well- crafted but notoriously cheesy ballads who's knocked around with the likes of Herb Alpert and the Carpenters since the mid- fifties. Initially, many Costello fans found the combination perplexing at best and abominable at worst. But the first real surprise of Painted From Memory is how much it sounds like a Costello album. Sure, there's that clicking drumbeat, the muffled trumpets and the flourishing arrangements, but the songs themselves fall right in line with Elvis' own penchant for melodic ballads, a la "Shipbuilding," "Town Cryer" and "All This Useless Beauty."

The album's second and most lasting surprise is the quality of the teamwork. This project is obviously not hurried studio time aimed at selling oodles of records, but rather the very precise, determined work of two gifted artists. As a result, trying to decipher and describe where one's contribution begins and the other's influence ends is a nearly impossible task-- Painted From Memory's most outstanding tales of loss and bitterness, "I Still Have That Other Girl," "Toledo," "The Sweetest Punch" and the album's title track are reminiscent of Costello's most clever and haunting work and Bacharach's memorable piano melodies stretch the old punk's voice to new limits. While the album's ambience is most certainly Bacharach's lounging pop, the songs never seem to stray too far from where one might imagine Elvis taking them.

As initially imagined, the collaboration is a quirky one. The instrumentation and flow of the album are difficult at first, but the melodies are apparent. Like many Costello albums, Painted From Memory's complexity requires a patient ear, but once it catches that ear, it doesn't let go.

-Neil Lieberman