Gargling Gobstoppers
Time Out London:
Don’t be discouraged by the dreadful cover, which evokes those tatty Blues compilations so beloved of motorway service stations. The Delivery Man is Costello’s first full studio album with his touring band The Imposters (featuring two thirds of The Attractions), and throughout he’s hell-bent on proving that last year’s reflective North and marriage to jazz-lite poster girl Diana Krall haven’t tempered his customary fury.The highlights are alternatively berserk and reflective, but never less than kinetic: the holler of ‘Button My Lip’ is his most wilfully dissonant opener since ‘Uncomplicated’, while both ‘Bedlam’ and ‘Needle Time’ - a bastard hybrid of ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ and ‘Mannish Boy’ married to gleefully vicious lyrics - are coruscating. Aside from the bouncy R&B of ‘Monkey To Man’, there’s little light relief.
The clutch of simple ballads certainly deliver, although Costello’s wavering croon bumps awkwardly into Emmylou Harris’s keening harmonies at times. Elsewhere, Lucinda Williams hijacks the rollicking ‘There’s A Story In Your Voice’, caterwauling all over it like a drunken waitress gargling gobstoppers.
Where Costello really falters is in his transparent quest to write a classic soul ballad. He badly wants to inhabit the territory occupied by Dan Penn’s imperious ‘Dark End Of The Street’, but lacks both the lightness of touch and the vocal chops to pull it off;both ‘Either Side Of The Same Town’ and ‘The
Judgement’ descend into overwrought melodrama, ensuring a record of frequent fireworks is peppered with the occasional damp mis-fire. Not quite a classic, then, but a brave, bolshie album.