CostelloNews.com

The Sunday Times (London)

September 19, 2004

If you’re one of those people who admires Costello’s genre-hopping projects, but doesn’t actually want to sit through them, then this one’s for you. There’s some sort of continuing narrative flowing through the album — because heaven forfend that Costello would just write a bunch of rock’n’roll songs — but you don’t need to follow the story arc to enjoy what is probably the best thing the man has done since Brutal Youth. The reference points, for longtime fans, are Almost Blue and Get Happy! — Costello’s early-1980s homages to country music and Southern soul. The Delivery Man was recorded in Mississippi, and it shows. The country songs include duets with Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris; the soul side features the Imposters (two-thirds of the Attractions) at their finest, Costello at his sharpest. Four stars
Mark Edwards
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Observer Music Monthly(London) - Phil Hogan, 19 September

A new Elvis Costello record invariably raises hopes of a return to form, though which form is anyone's guess, since no two fans agree on his high water mark. Get Happy ? Those Burt Bacharach croonings? 'Shipbuilding'? King of America ? In terms of ambition, some might point to his latest classical CD, also released this month, Il Sogno , a full-length work scored for an Italian ballet based on A Midsummer Night's Dream and performed by the LSO. (Those nervous of high culture should head for track nine, a Gershwinesque drama of spiralling horns and exploding drums.)
What The Delivery Man signals though is a return to melody after his last 'straight' pop offering, When I Was Cruel , which despite shots of brilliance was easier to lose patience with than lose your heart over, with its sudden movements and miscellaneous gratings. The opener here could be a bonus track from those sessions - a cacophony of bumping bass and plonking 'hot club' piano that sounds like someone playing it with their feet.
As for the rest, though, there is a lot to like and even love. One hesitates to describe Costello as relaxed, but here he is at his most assured. Absent is any straining at theme or grandeur; there is no studio trickery; no room for showboating among his musicians (his regular band, The Impostors, plus guests). Vocally, Elvis is on song too, having abandoned his dentist's chair vibrato of recent years in favour of the less studied passion of his earlier records, alternating his flights of fury with that familiar close-mike intimacy with which he can bring the tenderest utterance to the brink of menace. These are fine songs - some sprung on modish rhythms, others dipped in country or blues - and possessed of tunes with the nuisance power to follow you around the house. 'Country Darkness' is an aching ballad in the mould of 'Motel Matches'. There's a crazed duet with a stupendously drawling Lucinda Williams and what sounds like eight guitars played through the same amp. The stately 'Nothing Clings Like Ivy' and 'Heart Shaped Bruise' see him sharing the vocals with Emmylou Harris. In between, there's dark wit in 'Monkey to Man' and foreboding in the title track - vintage Costello with its ominous refrain ('In a certain light he looks like Elvis; in a certain way he seems like Jesus') amid the drone of organ and lazy snare. The album ends with the beautiful and affecting 'Scarlet Tide' from the movie Cold Mountain , performed again with Harris in close attendance over a lone, picked, folk guitar. If you used to love Elvis Costello, you'll love this.
Burn it: 'Nothing Clings Like Ivy'; 'The Delivery Man'
**** out of 5
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he Independent On Sunday (London) , Sept. 19 '04

ROCK
Elvis Costello
The Delivery Man

LOST HIGHWAY

So we have to just accept there are two Costellos these days. One is the ‘crooner”; the other the uneasy-listening punk poet. And while we’re about to get new albums from both, only this will be a pleasure to review. Over the course of its 14 tracks (13 if you buy it in the US, where the suicide-bomber ballad ‘She’s Pulling Out the Pin” has been removed), we get the only Costello that ever mattered -before the ballet soundtracks and Bacharach comparisons (almost) ruined him. On the evidence of this, Elvis is alive and kicking against the pricks. And who’d want him any other way? II Sogno, anyone? Exactly.

Simmy Richman
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The Boston Globe

Elvis Costello, "The Delivery Man" (Lost Highway, Sept. 21) and "Il Sogno" (Deutsche Grammophon, Sept. 21). Only a musician as irrepressible as Costello gets away with such a wild double drop. A new rock album with the Imposters that was recorded in Oxford, Miss., features guest spots from Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, and Alison Krauss goes toe-to-toe with Costello's first full-scale orchestral work, commissioned by an Italian dance company and recorded with the London Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas.

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The New York Post

September 19, 2004

Elvis Costello
"The Delivery Man"
Lost Highway Records

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, on his new CD Elvis Costello hands over an excellent disc with a true aim and songs that are unmistakably his.

In contrast to last year's confessional "North," the new songs sport faster tempos and display the rocker's gift for storytelling.

The disc has a wonderful low-tech looseness. It is an album of simple, vital songs by a Costello who's looking at the world wearing other people's shoes. He even does a species switch when he tries on the perspective of a monkey eyeballing us humans.

That song, "Monkey to Man," is a terrific rockabilly strut. When placed next to a ballad such as "Nothing Clings Like Ivy," "Monkey" lends the slower song an appealing dynamic.

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Another Observer (London) review -

Elvis's double

Molloy Woodcraft
Sunday September 19, 2004
The Observer

Elvis Costello
Il Sogno
(Deutsche Grammophon)
The Delivery Man (Mercury)
The diversity of Elvis Costello's output over the last decade or so is undeniable. His work with the Brodsky Quartet, 1992's The Juliet Letters , prompted him to learn musical notation, and the discovery evidently proved a springboard. Since then he has scored songs for Anne Sofie von Otter with the Brodsky, performed with people such as the guitarist Bill Frisell (at his own Meltdown in 1995 - don't look for the recording, it's heavy going), and collaborated on an album with Burt Bacharach; last year saw him release an album of piano ballads. All the while he has carried on a career as a rock star. And now this: the release in the same week of a new album with his touring band the Imposters, and a recording of his first full-length work for orchestra. How does he do it?

In fact there's a little sleight of hand at play; the rock album The Delivery Man was made this year but, while Il Sogno received its premiere earlier in the summer (the score was written for the Italian dance company Aterballeto's loose transposition of A Midsummer Night's Dream) the recording, with the LSO and Michael Tilson Thomas, was made in the spring of 2002. All the same, releasing the two records in the same week is a deliberate move. In fact it looks like showing off.

To take the ballet score first, Costello has, unsurprisingly, gone wider than the conventional canon for his noises and influences. The Romanian cimbalom figures prominently for a start, playing the recurring figure representing confusion. And he has chosen to evoke the different types of character in the work with different modes of music; jazz creeps in for fairies - the stabbing strings of 'The State of Affairs' are supplanted by music which reminds you that Costello's father, Ross McManus, toured with the Joe Loss Orchestra, and later in 'Oberon and Titania' John Harle and Chris Laurence are used to great effect on saxophone and double bass before the score drifts off into what almost sounds like a Seventies orchestral soundtrack.

Not that Costello doesn't use the full palette at his disposal, and there are some great dramatic moments, as in the crashing strangeness and rage of 'The Jealousy of Helena', or 'Workers' Playtime', which follows, where Bottom's theme comes charging in like an ass, sparring with the other characters' motifs. Costello confesses to having been rushed to finish the score, but in fact, especially if you are following using the sleevenotes, the way he interweaves his themes as the action progresses is a revelation. Arching over all of it too is his sense of melody; you can almost hear him singing the main themes when they are restated in the closing 'The Marriage', so much are they his.

Recorded in Oxford, Mississippi, The Delivery Man is a rough and ready affair. Casting off the polished experimental quality of last year's When I Was Cruel, it is instead stripped back and sometimes ramshackle. Opener 'Button My Lip' gives you some idea of what is to follow, with huge shuffling drums from Chris Thomas and a bustling bassline from Davey Farragher; it turns into a bizarre gumbo as Steve Nieve references snatches of familiar melody on the piano, turning into a cacophonous din behind Costello's yelled spite, and ending with odd delay on the vocal and messy guitar chords. 'Country Darkness' is its antithesis; it's a slow country number, confusing at first because of the strange modulations in the piano, but blessed with a winning melody; Costello's voice is raw over lovely pedal steel.

Lucinda Williams makes a guest appearance on 'There's a Story in Your Voice', a standard country rocker, and it's one of the most bizarre performances you'll hear all year; she sounds genuinely drunk, blurting and slurring her words, a female, Deep South counterpart to Shane McGowan. Then 'Either Side of the Same Town' finds a pleasant cracked quality to Costello's voice on the high notes as he takes on his own close harmonies, sweet piano from Nieve and dirty tremelo guitar backing a mournful lament for ex-lovers trapped by a grid system that won't erase the memories.

And so on. In fact country slowie follows messy rocker throughout the album, a conscious juxtaposition and one which works well. It's hard to pick favourites; nearly every track deserves a mention; 'Needle Time' is among the best rockers, a fug of fuzzy low guitars and thick tom patterns that slows down to half-time for its chorus with some charm and fires up again with apparent abandon.

There are also three duets with Emmylou Harris to consider. Her and Costello's vibratos mesh nicely on 'Nothing Clings Like Ivy'; 'Heart-shaped Bruise' gels less well, as if the vocals were recorded at different times; but the prize goes to the closing track 'Scarlet Tide', written for the soundtrack to Cold Mountain, a sad little ditty where the pair's voices intertwine perfectly over what sounds like a plucked ukulele, beauty absolute. Two very different bits of work, then, and both rather successful in their way: reason enough to show off?