ELVIS COSTELLO: The Delivery Man

One of the artistically highest points in Elvis Costello´s career, the way i see it, gotta be the album ¨The Delivery Man¨ (2004).

¨The Delivery man¨contain 14 tracks and is an absolute perfect work, perhaps I would have add ¨Watching The Detectives¨, a live track included in his previous release with ¨The Imposters¨ ¨Cruel Smile¨ (2002), but that is just a whimsical idea of mine.

The album strikes me as formidable and inspiring and according to an article in wikipedia: The album had its genesis in a conceptual story apparently written for Johnny Cash. Costello himself states:

The Delivery Man started out as a story about the impact on three woman’s lives of a man with a hidden past. The story took the song "Hidden Shame" as its unsung prelude. Parts of the narrative ended up being displaced from the final album by more urgent songs taken from the news headlines. One of the songs moved aside was to find an ideal home onSecret, Profane & Sugarcane.

Davey Faragher ( Bass) and Pete Thomas (Drums) provide one of the most proficient rhythm sections in many a years. First time I listened the album I thought Robert Plant would jump at any moment with a microphone to join them, so strong was the playing that only Led Zeppelin at the peak of their powers and maybe David Bowie´s Tin Machine eponymous album could equal the energy of the drums and the elegant perfection of the bass playing.The riffing pedal steel guitar of John McPhee and the keyboards by Steve Nieve rock earnestly throughout the length of the Cd.

I have always maintained that Costello´s genius is kind of sparkling, an inspiration that explodes randomly to exalt his musicianship at just a precise moment in time. I obviously don´t know the way he works, I don´t know if he spends many hours trying to compose music and lyrics, but i like to imagine him jumping from his seat at some point and start playing and creating those great pieces like nobody could. There are some songs by Costello that makes the ride of his life through this world a very worthy case in my opinion because they transmit immediately a bang! a flush of emotions, fireworks through my whole self. A powerful artistic genius, but just in very defined moments.

We all know that originality is just a myth, that, no matter how hard you try, is impossible to reinvent the world at every step of the road. There are always weak moments in an artist´s life. Inspiration seems to avoid you, mediocrity sets in and you find yourself aimless facing a creative emptiness......Elvis Costello has the gift, though, to build precious gems amongst the whole load of albums he have made.

¨The Delivery Man¨ is the 21st. studio album recorded by Costello and the third with his band ¨the Imposters¨ with whom he has recorded 2 other albums, ¨Cruel Smile¨(2002), and ¨Momofuku¨(2008) and it is that precise moment in time in which Costello´s greater creative spirit sparks all over and shine in a demonic light. He produces sometimes ordinary works, for example ¨Almost Blue¨ (1981), an album made up exclusively from covers to country songs that was pointed out as a great country album in its time but that worked only to fulfill his love of this genre and nothing else in my opinion. Country stays at home and is not much appreciated outside, therefore lacks universality. Of course many may think different, this is just my idea of music appreciation.

Costello at his best can come with things like ¨the Delivery Man¨ (2004) ¨Armed Forces¨ (1979) or the excellent album of covers ¨For The Stars¨ (2001), and then you have to admit that he is one of a kind, one among millions of mediocre performers to take control of the last part of last century in music, just with a bunch of others. And still making some noise in 2009 with ¨Secret, Profane and Sugarcane¨ and in 2010 with ¨National Ransom¨.

Sabbath´s Indecent Theater, a poem by Kyran Lucien

Sabbath´s Indecency is nearly over,

There, a man deprived of heraldry.

All of his life driven away,

By a lowest estimation,

By his long time fame erected.

There a man crying in a cemetery,

Haunted by ghosts,

Of a lover gone,

Of an Oedipal motherly grip,

Looking for his own burial ground.

There a self detaching man,

Ruinating everything he touches,

Addicted to suffering, He, Who could have been best

In spite of his begrudging reactions to society of man,

He, who could have simply bliss out.

There a man over and done with life,

Facing suicide as the last act

Of an empty, lonely, bitter man

The greatest misery of all

in a father´s heart, and inside his own mind.

Philip Roth-Patrimony

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Submitted by Kyranlucien0129 on Tue, 02/22/2011 at 4:15pm.

By Kyran Lucien

Patrimony is an intimate and touching album of memories on Philip Roth´s father last years of life. It is as well a celebration on the life of a man whose extraordinary vitality and complex personality are the source of one of Mr. Roth´s richest and controverted characters ever. The love of the son for his father takes the writers mind to a tour the force through the whole of his family experiences to explain and re-create every possible memory in time that could explain the man as a whole and to deal with the extreme pain of being human, it is an attempt not to understand but to accept the sad destiny of humanity. Death. Why a man should die....? Herman Roth asks his son as well as he asks himself. Philip Roth makes the same question to all of us, and even though we know there´s no answer at all, we share and live with them that most dreadful and deeply embedded fear of all. Death is our common destiny, we will be sooner or later face to face with the final moment of our existence and it is up to us only how we are gonna received this uninvited and much despised guest. Through Herman and Philip Roth we see ourselves dealing with an intense gathering of emotions that can only be lived between creator and creation. Fortunately for Philip Roth, the final sum of feelings is a very good one. His father was a very stubborn man, but a stubborn man who loved deeply his family and fought for them. With some incongruence and lack of tact, yes, but with a great deal of love. Philip Roth is a proud son and a loving son. That I think is the best gift Herman Roth could ever have expected. The patrimony, a totally unexpected one, that is what Philip Roth receives at the end of his father´s life, and he receives it with a total submission, whether good or bad, his patrimony is the greatest proof of his love for his father through the ordeal of his last years, and he made his father sure he was loved and appreciated. Not everybody can feel so rewarded in life as they were. Patrimony is a novel that can be placed among the greatest things Philip Roth has ever written.