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FULL TEXT =========THE GUARDIAN============== Elvis Costello and the Imposters, The Delivery Man (Lost Highway) Alexis Petridis Friday September 17, 2004 The Guardian The Imposters are essentially Costello's most celebrated backing band, The Attractions, with bassist Davey Farragher replacing Bruce Thomas. Despite the dedication "to my wife", the resulting album is a far remove from last year's gooey North, which comes as something of a blessing: Costello is rarely at his best when he's love-struck. He certainly doesn't sound that way here. In fact, were it not for the dedication, you would fear for his marriage to Diana Krall, as he sets tales of sexual double dealing and domestic violence to a sound somewhere between the two albums he made in 1986: the Americana of King Of America meeting the over-amplified rawness of Blood and Chocolate. Amid the distortion there are guest appearances from Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, the latter entering into the album's spirit of bug-eyed abandon with considerable gusto on There's A Story In Your Voice. ============THE INDEPENDANT OF LONDON============== Album: Elvis Costello & The Imposters The Delivery Man, LOST HIGHWAY By Andy Gill 17 September 2004 As he strives to become modern pop's Renaissance man, one has to approach Elvis Costello albums with care, even trepidation, so diverse are they in style and aptitude. Thankfully, The Delivery Man captures him at the point of his creative cycle that involves The Attractions - or as the updated version is known, The Imposters - rather than some foray into jazz, opera, dance, or any of the other tangents that secure fawning coverage in the Sunday broadsheets but little affection among fans. As such, it's probably best regarded as the follow-up to 2002's When I Was Cruel, rather than last year's painful torch-song collection North. As ever, there's a substantial complement of reproach in these 14 songs, as couples fall out and fall apart, or wonder what they've let themselves in for. "I wish I could be a little more like a saint is/ Forgiving those who trespass against us," he reflects, over the rough-hewn Tom Waits-style R&B of "Needle Time". But it's not his natural character to be so forgiving, so his protagonists generally get short-ish shrift, which is about what they deserve. His misanthropy is probably best summed up in "Monkey to Man", a gloss on Dave Bartholomew's trenchant comic song "The Monkey Speaks Its Mind": "It's been headed this way since the world began," laments the monkey of mankind's globe-ravaging ways, "When a vicious creature took the jump from monkey to man." It's presented as a sort of Tex-Mex R&B groove in the Doug Sahm style, with Steve Nieve doing a sharp impression of Augie Meyer's distinctive organ style. Elsewhere, Nieve is on top form interjecting little quotes from Bernstein's "America" into the opening "Button My Lip", a bubbling jazz gumbo whose absurd time-signature is pumped along calmly by Davey Farragher's sinuous double bass and Pete Thomas's commanding drums. "Bedlam", an allegorical number about Bush's Crusade, has a similarly bustling manner, while elsewhere a crepuscular melancholy tone hangs like fog around the ponderous soul ballad "Either Side of the Same Town". As always, Costello dissects his characters with the steady scalpel of an anatomist, peeling back the veneer of respectability to bare the cruelties and incompetences that wreck our best intentions. The results can be quite startling, as in "She's Pulling out the Pin", in which the protagonist "... slipping off the hook/ Unbuttoning her dress/ There's just enough to make some man a mess" is depicted as a suicide bomber set to detonate one's emotions. It's typical of a mature, accomplished work that successfully accommodates Costello's discontents and trepidations within the comforting security of roots-based rock'n'roll. ===============MEMPHIS COMMERICAL APPEAL========== Elvis Costello goes 'outside of pop music' too By Bill Ellis September 17, 2004 Not one to be pegged down, Elvis Costello will see the release of two stylistically opposed albums on Tuesday: His latest collection of popular music, The Delivery Man; and Il Sogno, a concert adaptation of a ballet he scored to "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Where the Southern gothic twists of The Delivery Man is Costello at his most American-indebted, Il Sogno is the British composer at his most European. Commissioned in 2000 by Italian dance company Aterballeto and since tailored into an hourlong orchestral work, "Il Sogno" the composition is a mercurial match to the Shakespearean play. Bits of Old World folk, jazz and even Bartok colorfully bounce off a score grounded in Costello's personalized, modernist take on Impressionism, a charged yet sober language that finds parallels in the music of a fellow Brit like the late Sir Lennox Berkeley. "I've always taken strength in the things I love," says Costello. "And I've done exactly the same with this. While I'm not slavishly copying anything, I've absorbed a number of things outside of pop music in the last number of years." Costello's classical journey has been a good decade in the training. He paired off with the Brodsky Quartet for 1993's song cycle The Juliet Letters and has collaborated with both mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and Michael Nyman cohort John Harle (who returns the favor by playing on Il Sogno). Costello also taught himself to write music, a skill that enabled him to tackle the ballet's evocative orchestrations, all 200 pages of it, by himself in a mere 10 weeks. "Once I got through a mental block I had about it, I took to it," says Costello of learning to score music; he also wrote the orchestrations for his last album, North. "Il Sogno" has had a healthy shelf life in Europe, having been staged in Italy, Germany, France and Russia. The DG-released concert version was recorded two years later by the London Symphony Orchestra under the guidance of Michael Tilson Thomas. An American premiere came in July at the Lincoln Center Festival, where Brad Lubman led the Brooklyn Philharmonic in the large-scale work. Though "Il Sogno" has met with favorable reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post, Costello knows it won't be for everyone. Yet he hopes fans are will ing to accept the most ambitious side yet to the prismatic performer. "It's all me," he says. "It's all in my head. It's all personal to me (and) it's all of equal value to me. You don't do something of the scale and commitment of 'Il Sogno' idly."