The Delivery Man

The Delivery Man he may be, but this is a long overdue package: a much welcome, if not totally successful, return to form by Elvis Costello. He can write beautifully, but as with all of his stuff he just doesn't know when to stop writing more and more bloody words.

Still, backed by The Imposters (or the Almost Attractions - Steve Nieve, Davey Faragher and Pete Thomas) this is one of the best sounding and best played albums in a dog's age from the one-time Declan MacManus.

I don't mean that to be faint praise, because aside from one or two mis-steps, this is a darned fine band album. Recorded in Oxford, Mississippi, it has a great live feel to it (it really sounds like it is being played by a band playing together).

Better yet, there are some excellent guest vocal contributions from Lucinda Williams and, particularly, Emmylou Harris (the gorgeous "Heart Shaped Bruise" and the closing "Scarlet Tide").

It's great to have him back.

I'm not sure what the latest Mrs C will think of the dedication on the album: "This record is for my wife"; nice sentiment, but, eh, which wife? Sorry...

While a couple of songs, such as the opener "Button My Lip" and "Bedlam" fail to convince, there are many more songs like "Country Darkness", "Either Side of the Same Town" and "Monkey To Man" where the whole ensemble of the song, Elvis's voice and the performance of The Imposters really come together.

While the album has plenty of uptempo songs there are a couple of really mellow moments too, like "Nothing Clings Like Ivy" and "Heart Shaped Bruise", which have a bit of a country feel to them.
The album closes with a very simple arrangement of "The Scarlet Tide", which was originally performed by Alison Krauss for the Cold Mountain soundtrack and earned writers Elvis and T Bone Burnett an Oscar nomination. This time around it's a duet between Elvis and Emmylou Harris accompanied just by Elvis on Ukelele.

While last year's "North" was undoubtedly a downbeat classic, this is Elvis right back on track. If it was a couple of songs shorter it wouold have been unbeatable.

First the lyrical content. It is true that "Pulling Out the Pin" seems to refer to suicide bombing. It begins with a woman pulling a pin out of her hair, but this is just the first step in her preparation for an act of destruction involving the removal of another pin. EC is developing a taste for subverting the opening image of a song and telling a story with a twist, and in this respect "Pulling Out the Pin" works like the hostage-taking in "Radio Silence" on When I Was Cruel. Dropping it only shows the deep stupidity of the American (self-)censor. In a decision worthy of the old Soviet Union, the most obvious offending image has been suppressed while all the quietly dissenting stuff slips through.

"Monkey to Man", for example, the current single, talks of "flying bombs" and seems to be saying that 9/11 and its aftermath reveal the essential viciousness of humankind. What a waste of a species we are! The album opens with "Button My Lip", the first lines of which are "Don't want to talk about the government/Don't want to talk about some incident" - which one do you suppose that might be then?! Later in the same song we hear "It serves you right/now you are suffering" and the piano even delivers an ironic, broken version of "I like to be in America", the immigrant's song of praise to the land of the free from West Side Story. I could go on. These songs are full of lines that should offend a certain American opinion. Take, as a final example, a reworking of the nativity with Mary reduced to a wayward woman knocked up by someone other than her husband: "I've got this harlot that I'm stuck with carrying another man's child/The solitary star announcing vacancy burned out as we arrived".

But don't think this is a polemical album. There's no big thesis here, he certainly doesn't take sides, and the state of the world is really just the backdrop to a set of stories about troubled lives and failing loves. For every jab at America there is an attempt to reach out to it, most obviously through the music itself. EC draws on the roots of American music: blues, rock, and plenty of country. There's even a measure of jazz, which gives the drums and keyboards a prominence we don't often hear on an EC album. Steve Nieve clangs away at times or spirals, on "Bedlam", like Terry Riley's improvisations of the 60s.

Whatever it is, then, this isn't pub-style thrashing. It isn't even Blood and Chocolate, although some of the rougher textures may have fooled casual reviewers. On the contrary, this album is contrived, artful and controlled, almost to the point of showing off. And it has an exhilarating sense of purpose. If anything, it draws together the best of EC's various experiments. I'm very excited by it - can you tell?