This came out in 2004 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
If Elvis Costello tried to be a deliveryman, I doubt he’d last the week. He’d never be on time. He’d always be wandering off his route. And he’d never give customers what they wanted or expected.
Of course, transport’s loss is music’s gain, since the very qualities that would make Elvis the world’s worst courier coincidentally serve to make him one of the world’s most gifted songwriters. And one of the most adventurous. Less than a year ago, North was the only place Elvis wanted to be, tickling the ivories and crooning torch ballads to new squeeze Diana Krall. Now, however, displaying the short attention span that has fueled his career, the 50-year-old artist has pulled another 180°. Plugging in his axe and rounding up his merry band of Imposters, Costello makes a beeline for the Deep South (literally and musically). And while he’s there, he adds another essential masterpiece to a catalogue with no shortage of them — and no end in sight.
Recorded in the Mississippi Delta, Costello’s 21st disc The Delivery Man plunges this musical adventurer further and deeper into American roots music than ever before. Rawboned juke joint blues, tearstained country waltzes, twangy honky-tonk two steps, sweet Memphis soul, funky R&B and even a dash of Celtic-tinged bluegrass; Costello not only embraces and flirts with them all, he manages to filter them all through his idiosyncratic musical prism and connect them into his most unified and consistent set in ages.
It helps that the disc is a mini-concept album. Based around a loose, Biblically overtoned narrative, the disc follows a delivery man named Abel who leaves his wife Vivien (voiced by a trashily over-the-top Lucinda Williams) for her war-widow friend Geraldine (portrayed by the always angelic Emmylou Harris), only to end up entangled with Geraldine’s clinging daughter Ivy (also Harris). Or something like that. Truth is, Costello claims he purposely sequenced the songs out of order and left out some tracks to blur the narrative.
But no amount of subterfuge can blunt the impact of these 13 magnificent songs. From the raucous opener Button My Lip and the steel guitar weeper Country Darkness, through the honky-tonking There’s A Story In Your Voice and the groovy Monkey To Man, all the way to the searing blues of Needle Time and the gothic Scarlet Tide, these are Costello’s most memorable compositions in years — tunes crackling with energy, fraught with tension and bursting at the seams with creativity. Costello’s noisy underproduction doesn’t hurt either, imbuing the disc with an earthy immediacy that provides a direct conduit for the band’s dynamic work, highlighted by longtime pianist Steve Nieve’s elegantly ringing chords and drummer Bruce Thomas’s thumping syncopation.
OK, so maybe Costello couldn’t handle a milk route if his life depended on it. But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t deliver the goods here.
