Elvis Costello & The Imposters, Elvis Costello - The Delivery Man

Best since King of America

Clean out your ears. Listen to this cd five times and try and tell me it's not better than Spike, Juliet Letters, Useless Beauty, and even Brutal Youth. I won't believe you.

March 4, 2006

As good as it gets

I've never found fault with much that Elvis has produced over the years. Sure the braying, vibrato-laden voice requires suspension of certain critical impulses; and his tendancy to melodrama sometimes makes even the true believer waver. But for me these are really small quibbles when faced with the astonishing level of quality this man has consistently achieved. His lyrics conjure a complex range of associations that turn the denser songs into multi-faceted riddles. And no other lyrics today have the same authority and authenticity. Even if you don't know what the hell he's talking about, there's lots of fun in trying to figure it out (and singing along though your wife might leave you). The combination of these lyrics sung with Elvis' supercharged intensity backed by the confident, relaxed band on this record have come together into something special. This one really takes some time to get your head around, but when it clicks you realize it's the product of a mature master. January 27, 2006

Goodbye talent

Poor sound quality. Unmelodic songs. Screeching instead of singing. Nothing on this album will give you goosebumps or make your feet move like even the worst song on Armed Forces or This Years Model.

Performers grow and change. Nobody wants to hear 17 albums that are the same. You can change genres. But you also have to make good songs. There ARE good country songs out there. He can't write one. There are good quirky songs. He hasn't written one in several years. The sad fact is, as a man ages testosterone ebbs along with creativity and the well sometimes just runs dry. In its place pretentious associations with high brow artists is substituted. Can't rock anymore? Find a string quartet. Can't write a toe-tapper? Claim you didn't even want to. Sad.

EC was my favorite artist for about 15 years. I also read some about his song writing talent and realized after some analysis that while he can indeed turn a clever phrase, many of his songs are disjointed and incoherent lyrically. Not because he wanted them to be but because he was just stringing together clever phrases in rows rather than building a real song. I realized that the reason he would bristle in interviews when asked about song lyrics is that he was afraid that it would come out when someone tried to interpret them literally.

This album makes "Goodbye Cruel World" seem like a tour de force. "The Deportees Club" puts any song on this album to shame.

If you are looking for a good mature rocker with some attitude and talent, I suggest you try Graham Parker.

It's called rock n' roll, not clatter and shreik for a reason. Sounds like someone's playing a set of pots and pans on this one. January 25, 2006

Elvis has left the building

Update (after a half dozen spins): I bought "The Delivery Man" disc along with the latest from Deep Purple, called "Rapture of the Deep". Two of my all time favorites with new releases...YES! I had high hopes for Elvis Costello, but not really for Deep Purple. As it turned out, I was kind of disappointed with "The Delivery Man" but loved, Rapture of the Deep. Bravo DP!

Even after so many years, Elvis Costello just doesn't sound very inspired. They frankly sound way too complacent. On the other hand, Deep Purple sound hungry, powerful, a very inspired album! Both discs have good enough sound quality and production, but listening to these two bands, Deep Purple clearly have something special going on. Elvis' songwriting seems a lot weaker than their older material. But on the other hand, all eleven songs on "Rapture of the Deep" are top notch and have much more meat on the bone than "The Delivery Man." It's just my opinion, but the new Deep Purple shows me that these old rockers still have a lot to offer. Sorry Elvis.

Elvis Costello & The Imposters/The Delivery Man: 2 stars
Deep Purple/Rapture of the Deep: 5 stars January 12, 2006

The further decline of Elvis Costello

I had the faint hope that "The Delivery Man" would be a solid and tuneful set of punchy rock and roll and sharply writ lyrics as was Costello's previous "When I Was Cruel" from four years ago, but such is hardly the case.

The songs are wander bits of amorphous mood setting, vaguely sad, melancholic, inward drawn. The worst of "Painted from Memory", is irresolutely medium tempo collection of muzaked dirges with Burt Bacharach (both of whom apparently forgetting that Bachrach's work is marked as much by quirky, uptempo tunes) meets the pulse less shoe-gazing sniffling of "North".Costello has been trying to show everyone how much he's matured and grown as an artist and writer, but unlike someone like Paul Simon , who improved dramatically in his solo work after he finally bid adieu to the collegiate poesy of Simon and Garfunkel's too-precious word mongering, Costello tries to get it all in, to say it all in one song, and then again in the song after that. His songs tear at the seams, and there is not the overflow of talent you'd like, but rather an uncontainable spillage. Simon , through "Rhymin' Simon" and onward, knows the meaning of restraint, containment, care in image and metaphor. He remains a songwriter with an especially strong sense of pop structure, a matter that forces him to make each song the best he can do at the moment. Costello is, on occasion, a better melodist than Simon and a more interesting, verbally dexterous lyricist, but it is his lack of care that sinks him here and through out most of his output in the 90's. Tom Waits, his closet in terms of sheer talent, does the sloppy and the unrestrained with the kind of genius we reserve for Miles Davis and Picasso. Costello is shy of genius, is a brilliant craftsman when he applies the technique, and reapplying himself is exactly what is called for.

The songs on the new one are unfocused and drift in structure--Costello seems to be trying to convince that playing being indecisive about how he wants a melody to unfold, or what mood and psychology he wants to get across is enough to evoke Hamlet like assumptions of deep thought and artful equivocation on key narrative points. He sounds like he's trying to be artfully oblique, but what Costello forgets is that his greatest talent was his ability to absorb the styles of fifty or so years of rock,pop and rhythm and blues styles and then compose a fantastically buoyant music that was at once subtly argued in the lyrics and intensely rocking with the music. Costello must not like to dance anymore, and has entered middle age with some overblown assumptions that he needs to be artier, moodier, more depressed, more diffuse, more obtuse than he was when he was a young punk trying to make a buck off his bad attitude.

There are those die hard fans who would counter that Costello's lyrics are the subtlest and most literary of his career, something I would argue against, but all the same this is a weak defense of the general torpor that saturates "The Delivery Man". Even if it were so, albums that are more interesting to read than to listen to are fit, on principle, to be used for target practice at the next skeet shoot. December 29, 2005

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