CostelloNews.com

Elvis Costello The Delivery Man our grade A- Artist / Band: Elvis Costello Record Label: Lost Highway Release Date: September 21, 2004 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our Review: Elvis Costello started out his latest release as a concept album in the vein of Neil Young's Greendale, except his was about a delivery man who seduced women. But midway through the recording sessions, the original concept went out the window and he decided he wanted to write music for a balletic version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, called Il Sogno (also out today). Is your head spinning yet? The bottom line is that Man is Costello's most exciting album in ages. Miles away from last year's mushy North, it's filled with warm, infectious bursts of country-infused rock like "Monkey to Man" and "There's a Story in Your Voice." Guest appearances by women such as Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams add a thrilling presence. What a concept! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/reviews/2004-09-20-listen-up_x.htm Elvis Costello, The Deliveryman, Il Sogno (each * * * ½) Pop's most relentless eclectic has outdone himself by releasing two vastly different recordings at once and scoring on both counts. The instrumental Il Sogno, which Costello composed to accompany an Italian dance company's presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, brims with the bittersweet melodicism and alternately playful and wistful wit that have distinguished his work as a singer/songwriter. And the London Symphony Orchestra handles Costello's orchestrations, which nod to jazz and jazz-influenced composers such as George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, with grace and vitality. The Deliveryman, a song cycle based on the account of a mysterious man who enters the lives and imaginations of three small-town women, has a similarly adventurous, theatrical spirit. The character-driven songs, several delivered by Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, funnel rootsy textures into tautly soulful vignettes. Other numbers include Costello's haunting new version of his and T Bone Burnett's Oscar-nominated The Scarlet Tide. None of these tunes is likely to soar up the pop charts, but like most of Costello's other forays, they'll appeal to those who love music as broadly and boldly as he does. —Elysa Gardner -CD REVIEW `Il Sogno' is classic Elvis Costello By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff | September 21, 2004 Elvis Costello's ballet "Il Sogno" is interesting and attractive because we know he wrote it, but it is good enough to reward attention even if it were by an unknown composer. The music is Costello's response to a commission from an Italian ballet company that wanted to stage its own dance adaptation of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 2000; now it appears on Deutsche Grammophon CD in a performance by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra. Before recording the score, Costello listened to advice from Thomas, and took it, but he wrote the music and orchestrated it on his own -- unlike other stars from the world of popular music who have called on professional assistance when they wanted to write something "classical." In the field of popular music, you'd have to go back to George Gershwin to find a composer-performer undertaking a project as ambitious as "Il Sogno." The music is rhythmically lively, as dance music must be. It is full of character and storytelling, and the orchestration is skillful, unusual, and colorful -- there are prominent roles for the trumpet, the saxophone, and the Hungarian cimbalom (a kind of hammered dulcimer), as well as a battery of jazz percussion. One would expect some catchy tunes, and Costello supplies them, but the piece is also quite ambitiously and thoroughly composed. Go to www.boston.com/ae/music to hear clips from "Il Sogno."The tunes are themes, and most of them are derived from a "mother theme" -- the "dream" motive, which is itself built out of a complex harmony that recalls Ravel. The themes assemble themselves, recur, develop, intermingle, and arrive at a destination. Each of the worlds in Shakespeare's play -- the court; the forest of fairies and enchantment; the rustics -- has its own sound in Costello's orchestration. Sometimes ideas are not developed as fully as they might be; this is true of many ballet scores, which by definition are mosaics. Sometimes one wants to hear more inner activity between the outer layers of the music, more counterpoint propelling and illuminating the harmony. Sometimes Costello falls into cliche, but he often avoids or sidesteps it. It is easy to play the game of influences -- one can hear all kinds of familiar music that Costello loves, everything from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" to the film scores of Henry Mancini and John Williams. (There's as much harp-and-celesta here as there is in Williams's "Harry Potter" music.) There are references to baroque music, fanfares, hunting horns, Latin music, and trumpet blues in the night. Despite its invention, charm, and surprise, it doesn't neglect the darker side. Costello says in the liner notes, "[This score] has the edges, angles that I go looking for in rock-and-roll, but the way they are achieved is utterly different." Costello's fans will recognize him here, and discover more of him. Posted on Tue, Sep. 21, 2004 TWO SIDES OF ELVIS This 'Delivery' is pretty special By Robert Philpot Star-Telegram Staff Writer During the past 25-odd years, Elvis Costello's restless eclectic streak has taken him tumbling through country, Burt Bacharach collaborations, torch-song jazz and classical recordings such as today's Il Sogno. It also has taken him through a career littered with uneven pop albums, which are seldom uninteresting but -- since about 1983, anyway -- almost always frustrating in their inconsistency. The Delivery Man is less frustrating than most, with a higher-than-average ratio of tasty morsels to bland or sour bits. There's a story in here somewhere, about a handful of characters in a small town, but the draw is the music, which for once makes Costello's busy wordplay take a back seat. Costello and his band, the Imposters -- longtime cronies Steve Nieve (keyboards) and Pete Thomas (drums), as well as relatively recent addition Dave Faragher on bass -- have achieved an effortless groove that's loose when it needs to be and tight when that's necessary. Inconsistency still arises -- the first half of the album doesn't quite gel, as cluttered rockers compete with rather than complement Memphis-soul-drenched ballads, and the band can't save the mismatch of Lucinda Williams' slurred voice and Costello's hoarseness on their duet. But things start to mesh with the title track, with a refrain of "In a certain light, he looked like Elvis/In a certain way, he felt like Jesus," giving the album its first immediate hook. But then we get to the second half, and if albums still had sides, this is the one that would get played the most. It kicks off with Monkey to Man, a sequel to Dave Bartholomew's 1954 hit The Monkey, and the song is the bounciest, most danceable thing Costello has put on disc in years. Ballads dominate the rest of the disc, with Emmylou Harris joining Costello for three duets, her polished, sweet vocals helping rein in some of Costello's excesses. Costello, who did his best work between 1977 and 1982, would like for us to avoid boxing him in to the past, which would be easier if he had put out more than one or two solid albums in the past 20 years. The Delivery Man is his best since 1996's All This Useless Beauty; if Costello wants to prove that he's still a valid and growing musician, this is the kind of evidence he needs. GRADE: A- Elvis Costello The Delivery Man Lost Highway -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Philpot, (817) 390-7872 rphilpot@star-telegram.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MUSIC REVIEW: * * ** (4 stars out of 5) Elvis Costello: Il Sogno Costello treats listeners to a classical adventure By Marshall Spence | Sentinel Staff Writer Posted September 21, 2004 In some form or other, the music of the classical composers of the past has influenced nearly every aspect of modern-day music. So, it would make sense that the bard with the nasally voice, nerdy glasses and perpetually evolving musical bag of tricks, Elvis Costello, would make the leap to probe into his compositional roots and tip his punk-rocker hat to the great composers who preceded him. Costello's latest foray into the rich, creative and transcendent nether regions of the Romantic and Impressionistic periods is like a musical "Where's Waldo." Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, Il Sogno -- literally, "The Dream" -- is a kaleidoscope of musical styles and a narrative fantasy story tour de force. It throws so much musical variation around that the listener can't even sneeze for fear of missing something important. Costello penned the masterful piece for the Italian dance company Aterballetto for its adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He cranked out the 200-page score in an impressive 10 weeks and wrote it without the aid of a computer, preferring the old-fashioned method of pencil and composition paper. Due to deadline constraints, Costello inscribed the last 170 pages of it right into the full score. Costello's sense of dramatic pace and timing reveals his maturity and wisdom as a composer. The musical narrative plateaus and plummets, and he doesn't give the listener everything at once, carefully doling out the excitement. Yet, there's no stinginess in Costello's lavish use of musical styles -- Il Sogno is loaded with variety. This piece samples everything from Bach to Gershwin, with even some Eastern flavor thrown in the mix. One of the most kick-butt musical moments in the piece is "Oberon and Titania." If this is Costello's artistic vision of the king and queen of the fairies, those two must be some pretty hip, swinging cats. The movement opens with screeching, distorted violins, and then abruptly body slams the listener into a beautiful, delicate, poised motif in a lilting compound meter with oboe, soprano sax and clarinet playing catch with the melody. About two minutes into the movement Costello changes step again and drop kicks the listener into a jazzy, Leonard Bernstein-ish variation of the original motif with world-renowned classical saxophonist John Harle doing his thing on soprano sax alongside jazz drummer Peter Erskine. In the "Tormentress," Costello delves deeper into the use of jazz elements to communicate turmoil, frustration and anger. Il Sogno is a surprisingly stunning, diverse and lovely orchestral composition, and if listeners can't find Waldo, they can find Costello -- whose true inspiration comes not just from one musical style, but from all the world's music. Marshall Spence can be reached at mspence@orlandosentinel.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday, September 21, 2004 This Week's Hot CD: Elvis Costello's 'The Delivery Man' The Delivery Man (Lost Highway) Alternating the hard rock funk of "When I Was Cruel" with the country balladry of "King of America," Elvis Costello mines familiar territory with new tools. His finest moments come in harmony with Lucinda Williams (wild and pent up as an unbroken horse) and Emmylou Harris (her loose precision guiding Costello into an elegance he hasn't attained by himself). Alone, he tends toward a vocal overstatement learned from American soul music. His singing is, however, not without surprises. The falsetto note on "Either Side of Town" is both unexpected and welcome, throwing a curve into the sentimental ballad. The Imposters -- a trio of former Attractions Steve Nieve (keyboards) and Pete Thomas (drums), with odd man out Davey Faragher (bass) -- offer distinctive arrangements for each tune. Three of the selections are co-writes, including "The Judgement," with former wife Cait O'Riordan, suggesting some of it might have been on the shelf for awhile. (Bill White) GRADE: B+ Pitchfork's song-review of the new single: Elvis Costello & The Imposters: "Monkey to Man" "Monkey to Man", the debut single from Elvis Costello's just released The Delivery Man LP, exemplifies the album's conventional, stripped-down rock 'n' roll. Said to have been inspired by the New Orleans-style R&B of "big beat" inventor Dave Bartholomew's 1954 cut "The Monkey", Costello's song opens with a muted Southern-rock guitar shuffle, and opens with Elvis focusing his vitriol not on just one lone victim (as per usual), but on the entirety of humankind: "Points up to heaven with cathedral spires/ All the time indulging in his base desires.../ It's been headed this way since the world began." Before the track gets too steeped in history, though, a dentist's drill keyboard straight from This Year's Model bores through, and a key-switching chill precedes an old-fashioned call-and-response between Costello and his Imposters that elevates the song's simple chorus. The lyrics aren't as sharp (nor are the hooks as snaring) as on 2001's When I Was Cruel, but that album saw him straining to fit into a modern idiom, cramming his record with more styles, verses, and drum loops than it could almost stand. Here, Costello sounds relaxed and authoritative, content to play the cards he's kept hidden up his sleeve for 30 odd years. And the hand still slays here-- especially with this track's live, off-the-cuff feel. While Costello's lyrics tend to fare better with a tighter focus, "Monkey to Man"'s melody gathers moss with repeated listens, and the strength of his singing voice is nothing short of astounding given his age. A plus for fans: It would appear that Elvis has got this formula nailed. If he can resist the urge to continually jump genres and attempt to confound his audience's expectations, he could be cranking out material of this caliber well into his golden years. 3.5/5 [Jason Crock; September 21st, 2004] Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine Elvis Costello's 21st studio album The Delivery Man was intended as a song cycle or a concept album, not that you could ever tell from listening to album. During the pre-release promotion for the album, Costello claimed that he had written a narrative concerning a delivery man in the American South, following him on his journeys and through his relationships with three women of different ages and backgrounds. He also said that he deliberately presented the songs on the album out of narrative order, even taking songs off the record if they revealed too much about either the character or the story. All of this pretty much means that The Delivery Man lacks even a semblence of a narrative, and the only way to know that it's supposed to have one was to read pre-release press or reviews. In other words, the record wound up not as a concept album but as a conceptual album, one that is inspired by the South, in both its music and its imagery, so it's fitting that it's released on the Americana label Lost Highway in Costello's ongoing quest to release an album on every one of Universal's various imprints. While the narrative may have been thrown out the window, that doesn't mean it wasn't needed, since the fledgling concept helped focus Costello even if he didn't follow it through to a complete conclusion. The story of The Delivery Man may have faded away, but working within its framework has inspired Costello to craft his most consistent, unified rock & roll album in many, many years. It's also his best rock record in a long, long time, one that pulls off the nifty trick of being looser, harder than When I Was Cruel while being as sophisticated as North. Make no mistake, this is a composer's record, written with an assured, knowing hand and a deliberate sophistication; it's hard to hear "Country Darkness" without envisioning the written score that gives the tune its gentle lilt. Instead of being an Achilles' heel, this bent toward serious, structured composition is a benefit, revitalizing Costello's writing. On Cruel he sounded labored, as if writing a rock album was a chore, but here he's threaded different musical strands — chiefly country, blues and soul, but also how he wrote in his '80s heyday; witness how "Either Side of the Same Town" and "Bedlam" are close cousins to Trust — into a style of writing that's more akin with North than any previous rock record. Here, there's an economy to his words and a directness in the basic melodic structure that gives the songs a strong backbone, and help ground his winding eclectism, which he nevertheless keeps in check by concentrating primarily on Southern musical traditions. But what really makes The Delivery Man work is that it just plain sounds good. It's the first album that he's recorded in its entirity with his road band the Imposters, and they give this music serious muscle, but it also helps that the production by Costello and Dennis Herring stays out of the way — it's simple, direct and unadorned, letting the performances shine through. The Delivery Man isn't perfect — "The Scarlet Tide" is as mannered here as it was on the Cold Mountain soundtrack, while the very good "There's a Story In Your Voice" is nearly derailed by an unhinged Lucinda Williams — and it never feels as urgent as his prime work, but it's at once his most accomplished and visceral record as a veteran rocker, which is welcome indeed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Dabbler Elvis Costello & The Imposters The Delivery Man (Lost Highway) Elvis Costello Il Sogno (Deutsche Grammophon) It would be hard to pinpoint precisely when it happened, but at some point, Elvis Costello confused his record collection with his own career. It probably started with Almost Blue, his 1981 country-covers album. Costello had no business performing classics by Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, but for some reason, it worked out pretty well anyway; the worshipful inexperience he and his band brought to the task bent even the most resistant tracks to their will. Viewed as an aberration at the time, Almost Blue has set the standard for Costello's later excursions into whatever genre he feels like tackling, whether it needs his involvement or not. Costello's simultaneously released new albums find him determined to prove once again that he can do right by whatever style suits him. But he never quite proves it. Recorded in Nashville, The Delivery Man combines elements of country, soul, and the general American rootsiness of Costello's great King Of America, but never quite matches its predecessor. A loose concept album about a possibly murderous deliveryman named Abel and the women in his life (represented on two different tracks by Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams), The Delivery Man only sparks to life when it slows down. The album-opening "Button My Lip" and the politically charged "Bedlam" exemplify an approach Costello can't pull off anymore: spitting venomous vocals over a beat that charges to keep pace with him. The searing ballad "Country Darkness" and "The Judgement" (originally written for Solomon Burke), on the other hand, capture Costello at his most searing. The songs scorch away the layers of formalism and academic appreciation and find a way to breathe on their own. Commissioned by Italy's Aterbelletto dance company, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, Il Sogno marks Costello's first attempt at a full-length orchestral piece. Intended to accompany a ballet adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it patches together a little Debussy, a little Aaron Copland, and a lot of George Gershwin. Saxophonist John Harle cuts loose on some solos to bring out the jazz, and it all sounds pleasant enough to not offend, as well as inventive enough to confirm Costello as more than a dabbler. It also sounds like, at best, a minor pleasure, which seems like the only kind of pleasure Costello has to offer these days. —Keith Phipps -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fogerty lacks rage Costello found down South BY Mark Guarino Daily Hereald Music Critic Posted Tuesday, September 21, 2004 Two of rock’s former angry young men are releasing new albums today. Elvis Costello, 50, traveled to Mississippi hill country for inspiration on his newest, and John Fogerty, 59, tunes up the acoustic guitars for his first in seven years. True to form, Fogerty gets in and gets out on “Deja Vu All Over Again” (Geffen). The album clocks in at 34 minutes — a little killer, a lot filler. The former leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival spared no venom setting the standard for mixing rock and politics in less than three minutes. These days, that rage fades into resignation. The laid-back title song doesn’t have the driving anger of “Fortunate Son,” but shares its regret. Atop strumming acoustic guitars and Benmont Tench’s solemn organ, Fogerty connects the dots between follies in Vietnam and Iraq, singing, “day after day another momma’s crying/she’s lost her precious child to a war that has no end.” Too bad the rest of the album doesn’t dig any deeper. Singing about his favorite choice of pie, buying his daughter pink ice cream and a wife who won’t get off his back, Fogerty coddles himself with tender trivialities. The mostly acoustic songs have a light step, but nothing sticks. A bit of the former Fogerty rises on “She’s Got Baggage,” a punk rant about a stalker, and “In the Garden,” an ending stab at guitar psychedelics. They are not enough to perk up the album’s subdued mood. A Mark Knopfler cameo doesn’t help, either. His elegant guitar fills are directly lifted from “Sultans of Swing,” by his former band, Dire Straits. On a song about detachment (“Nobody’s Here Anymore”), on an album called “Deja Vu,” the choice is oddly appropriate. After extended dalliances with torturous torch singing, Elvis Costello retreated to Oxford, Miss., and Sweet Tea Studios, home to R.L. Burnside and Buddy Guy, to seek true grit. “The Delivery Man” (Lost Highway) is proof the sabbatical worked. This album is the most ferocious Costello has sounded in years. With his band of Imposters (keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist Davey Faragher, drummer Pete Thomas), Costello sinks his knees into deep Southern boogie, country soul and bedlam blues. The down-home environment is the right conduit for the holy racket raised on songs like “Button My Lip” and “The Name Of This Thing Is Not Love,” the latter veering into psychedelic territory thanks to Nieve’s liberal use of the theremin. Costello’s lyric writing returns to force, skewering at random, including evolution itself — from the perspective of a monkey, he sings, “the only purpose you serve is to bring us our food … outside the bars we use for keeping you out.” Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams — her scorched voice more burned-out than ever — lend background harmonies and duet vocals on songs with bruising affections. They work well with Costello, himself sounding loosened, and setting off yelps atop the noisy gutter blues. A strange circumstance for a man who today is also releasing his first collection of orchestral work (“Il Sogno”). Down in Elvis country, something must have been funny in the pecan pie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Elvis Costello The Delivery Man Lost Highway $13.98 Elvis Costello's 'Delivery Man' has the goods Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic Elvis Costello apparently needs the challenges. He follows last year's "North," an ambition collection of polished art songs undoubtedly inspired by his marriage to jazzy chanteuse Diana Krall, with not just another batch of surly rock songs but also the simultaneous release of his first orchestral composition, "Il Sogno," and an oblique concept album of stripped-down rock songs called "The Delivery Man." Recorded in Oxford, Miss., with his three-man band of longtime collaborators, the Imposters, "The Delivery Man" is the kind of smart, literate rock his fans have come to expect from Costello, whose artistic collaborations have ranged from the classical Brodsky Quartet to pop maestro Burt Bacharach. Picking up where he and the Imposters left off on the 2002 release "When I Was Cruel," the new album loosely concerns the lives of three female characters. Nashville renegades Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams were drafted to give his characters voices. Also contributing to "The Delivery Man" is pedal steel guitarist John McFee -- a former member of Bay Area bands the Doobie Brothers and Clover -- who played on Costello's 1977 debut, "My Aim Is True." Costello never makes it easy. He opens the set with an abrasive, dissonant rant, "Button My Lip," that channels James Brown but is hardly the kind of upbeat, sunny track usually selected to open albums. He breaks up his obscure narrative with two side steps, "Bedlam," which juxtaposes the Nativity story with the modern-day Middle East, and "Monkey to Man," a rocking update of the 1954 Dave Bartholomew take on the theory of evolution, "The Monkey," where the singer speaks in the voices of the monkeys. Costello wraps his intensely observed portraits in sturdy, tense and spare rock arrangements, recorded largely without effects, and more than capably performed by drummer Pete Thomas, keyboardist Steve Nieve and bassist Davey Farragher. His singing has become so expert over the years that he fearlessly tackles daring passages as confidently as he whispers his way through the gentle parts. His craftsmanship rings through every corner of the 13-song set. If the underlying narrative concept of the album remains somewhat obscure, the individual songs stand powerfully on their own. Whether it's the Southern twang of "There's a Story in Your Voice" (with Williams), the Dylanesque sneer of "Needle Time" or the baroque pop of "The Name of This Thing Is Not Love," Costello is telling his own story, in his own voice. It is a personal style that he has assiduously developed over more than 27 albums and that he continues to refine on the stark and gripping "The Delivery Man." E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.