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Elvis
Costello
The Delivery Man
label: Lost Highway
released: 09.21.04
our score: 2.5 out of 5.0
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There comes
a point in an artist's career - usually after 10 years or so -
when every new album brings with it the hopeful plaudit, "return
to form."
Elvis Costello
reached that watermark long ago, somewhere around the time Blood
and Chocolate, his 9th studio album, was released in 1986.
And although he has never actually returned to the visceral rock
of his first three albums, his last "loud" album, 2002's
When I Was Cruel, was closer to that style than anything
he'd recorded in 20 years. Characteristically, he then backed
away from rock and released North, an exercise in classicist,
torch pop.
With The
Delivery Man, his 22nd studio project, Costello again embraces
rock, country, classical and R&B in a strange, swampy stew
that some have championed as the true homecoming to his late-'70s
hey-day.
But that's
a dangerous and terribly inaccurate portrait of this messy album
when most of the material here feels dry and aimless.
The touchstone
is the American South and the music of its people - blues, country
and rockabilly. Costello has said that he built the songs around
the story of a southern love triangle. But he abandoned the concept
during recording and shuffled the tracks in favor of cohesion
over storyline. Subsequently, his tale of southern lust is inconsequential.
The Delivery Man is all about texture, mood and style over
substance.
The best offerings
here are as infectious and musically literate as any he has penned.
"Monkey
to Man," is a jaunty, shuffling tribute to blues and rockabilly
(even though I can't get past an irksome similarity to "Wooly
Bully"). "The Name of This Thing Is Not Love" rides
a snaky organ groove and rises to a feverish rhythmic tension,
where Costello whoops and hollers over a syncopated piano crescendo.
And "Bedlam"
is not only lyrically robust ("I've got this phosphorescent
portrait of Jesus meek and mild/ I've got this harlot that I'm
stuck with carrying another man's child) but boasts an electrifying
mix of tricky rhythms and psychedelic melodica noodling.
But these
tracks are spread amongst such a disparate and threadbare patchwork
of musical pastiche that they feel buried.
During the
ballads (which make up roughly half of The Delivery Man)
it sounds like Costello couldn't shake the dressiness of North.
The saccharine "Nothing Clings Like Ivy," and "Heart
Shaped Bruise," he writes in that same torchy style, only
adding some pedal steel and Emmylou Harris' vocals to sell it
as country.
Even some
of the rockers suffer from a seeming lack of attention to form
and pace.
"There's
a Story in Your Voice" might be the poorest recording Costello
has ever put on an album. What begins as a promising, bluesy vamp
ends in unforgivable shambles as Lucinda Williams (shockingly)
ruins his song by singing in a grating, affected howl that overtakes
everyone else on the track.
The effect
of this cut-and-paste musical style is nothing short of bewilderment.
While there are a few trophy winners in the clutch, they are few
and far between - scattered in the ashes of a conceptual album
spoiled. What should perhaps feel and sound like an ode to his
musical roots ends up feeling more like an ill-conceived gimmick.
26-Oct-2004
12:15 AM
If you
liked The Delivery Man...
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