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How much music can an Elvis Costello fan possibly hope to process? Within a month, Costello is releasing a new rock album; his first symphony piece; and double-disc reissues of three older albums. That’s a total of 150 tracks spread out over eight discs – the wallets of Costello’s most devoted followers are taking a furious beating these days. Luckily, the man’s ongoing creativity, resourcefulness and seemingly unquenchable thirst for experimentation and new avenues of expression have yet to fail him. Exhibit A: The Delivery Man, recorded with Costello’s band, the Imposters (featuring keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas of the storied Attractions) in Memphis earlier this year. That setting is crucial – Delivery Man is soaked in the country and blues of the American South, and during some moments (like the opening “Button My Lip”) he seems content to let the atmosphere do the heavy lifting, just as he did on last year’s relatively forgettable pop-ballads effort, North. But when the mid-album one-two-three punch of “Bedlam,” “The Delivery Man” and “Monkey to Man” kicks in, it’s clear that Costello’s muse is in high cotton. He winds up the album by reclaiming two songs loaned out to others: “The Judgement” (written for Solomon Burke) and “The Scarlet Tide” (sung by Alison Krauss on the Cold Mountain soundtrack, and here graced by Emmylou Harris’ harmony vocal). They’re two of his finest recent compositions, sealing the deal on Costello’s best album since … well, since 2002’s When I Was Cruel, which wasn’t too long ago. Don’t call it a comeback – Costello has been living up to his legendary past all along.
Rhino’s ongoing series of double-disc reissues of Costello’s back catalog – doled out in sets of three every few months – would finally seem to be winding down. Among the latest excavations is 1981’s Almost Blue, Costello and the Attractions’ uneven venture into traditional country. The band ventured to Nashville to record a clutch of covers with countrypolitan producer Billy Sherill, and the result still sounds as awkward and intermittently inspired as one would expect from such a pairing. Costello shows a flair for honky-tonk tunes like “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down,” but the gloriously hyper Attractions sound painfully restrained – like a Ferrari being driven at 15 MPH. The second disc is more than double the length of the original album, and features assorted outtakes and B-sides (including a resurrection of Leon Payne’s utterly unhinged “Psycho”), live cuts and demos.
Time has shrugged at Almost Blue, but it’s been kinder to Costello’s other covers album, Kojak Variety (recorded in 1990, but unreleased until 1995 – Costello explains the reasons in his masterful liner notes; each Rhino reissue has been graced by long, thoughtful essays from the man himself). Recorded in Barbados with a band handpicked from players who’d worked with him over the previous four years, Kojak offers a more rounded look at Costello’s influences, from the obvious (Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away”) to the odd (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “Strange”). Universally ignored upon its release, Kojak has held up splendidly, buoyed by the band’s chemistry and Costello’s good taste. The bonus disc sticks with the concept, surveying the many covers he released on B-sides and tribute albums during the 1990s, including a fascinating set of demos (including Bruce Springsteen’s “Brilliant Disguise” and Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream”) originally laid down for an audience of one: George Jones, who sadly never did add any of Costello’s selections to his repertoire.
If Kojak Variety has improved with age, 1984’s Goodbye Cruel World only sounds more dated and impenetrable with time. In the liner notes for a previous reissue, Costello infamously declared, “Congratulations! You’ve just bought our worst record!” He backs off that statement a little in the new edition’s liner notes (perhaps age has made him more sensitive to the album’s diehard defenders), but those words remain perfectly true. Goodbye Cruel World was Costello’s second collaboration with producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley; the team gelled on the previous effort, Punch the Clock, but a year later they were at cross purposes, Costello writing willfully obtuse songs and Langer and Winstanley shoehorning each into an incongruous synthesized pop framework. There are a few terrific songs – “Inch By Inch” is one of his very best – but it’s almost impossible to get one’s ears around them in these arrangements. But while Goodbye Cruel World itself still sounds misbegotten, it now becomes the Costello album to most benefit from Rhino’s double-disc treatment – the more straightforward demos and live cuts on the second disc allow the poor, battered songs on the first disc to truly be heard at last.
The sort of zealous fans who will buy those three albums after they’ve already bought them twice already (in their original releases and the early-’90s Rykodisc reissues) will also be the primary audience for Il Sogno, an orchestral score for an Italian dance company’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. While Costello’s considerable gift for melody has always been overshadowed by his frequently brilliant lyrics, he can’t escape the fact that words are his most powerful weapon. While Il Sogno’s surprisingly swinging upbeat moments have their charms, and it’s ultimately impossible to truly judge it without seeing the ballet, this instrumental suite (actually recorded two years ago) is doomed to be one for the faithful looking to complete their collections. With this much wonderful music to wade through, that’s a daunting but welcome challenge.
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