with The Face in 1983, he stated: "I feel it's under-realised. There were some very good songs on it and some very bad songs, but overall we didn't follow it through to anything definite enough. What I like about Get Happy!! is that it's got a very radical attitude to the playing and to the production, whereas both those things were lacking in Trust." By 2002, Costello described Trust as "a record that falls between the cracks a little bit", but stated that he felt "New Lace Sleeves" stood as one of the Attractions' greatest performances. According to Thomson, the weaker commercial performances of both Get Happy!! and Trust made Costello question where he was at in his career. He was unable to express his current thoughts into his own music and proclaimed that he "just wanted to sing other people's songs". Having recorded acoustic demos of several standards during the previous months, including "Gloomy Sunday" and Cole Porter's "Love for Sale", Costello devised an album of cover versions to test himself as a singer and interpreter. Released in October 1981, Almost Blue was composed entirely of country covers and was derided by the music press, particularly in the United States. Costello teamed up with former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick for Imperial Bedroom, his most heavily produced, heavily orchestrated and most expansive work up to that point; Trust marked Costello's final album with the team of Lowe and Béchirian. Retrospective appraisal Retrospectively, Trust has received acclaim from music critics, and has been cited as one of Costello's best, and most underrated, works. In 1989, Melody Maker published a positive retrospective of the album in which the magazine argued: "While the rest of pop was becoming increasingly simplistic, gaudy and escapist, Trust was angry, complex, a confrontation." Furthermore, they stated that Trust represented a stylistic tour-de-force that showed Costello at his fullest range and today is viewed as an amalgamation of 1980s pop and a "poignant anticipation" of the "bleak years" that would follow its release. Indeed, commentators have viewed Trust as exhibiting an artist and band at their creative peaks. Reviewing in 1991, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune described the album as "a shift to a less obviously subjective, more measured writing and performing style", while Armond White labelled it "social science with a nonstop beat for parties or revolutions" in Entertainment Weekly. Three years later, Select magazine's Clark