Recap Elvis Costello at Ravinia

The stage setup employed by Elvis Costello and his band The Sugarcanes at Ravinia Wednesday night didn't even include a drum kit, but it proved that an acoustic string-band-type format can do energetic justice to Costello's tremendous back catalog and even redeem some less-memorable new stuff. The bright bluegrass-meets-blues stylings of his new album, Secret, Profane, And Sugarcane, made for a couple of unflattering rewrites, but Costello bounded onstage in a suit and playfully cocked purple hat, clearly more prepared to play the part of good old mischievous E.C. than a Southern gentleman. He told the audience he shared his birthday with Ivan The Terrible—"we've all got a little Ivan The Terrible in us"—and gave a brand-new song a comically exaggerated intro: "We had to go into the studio at midnight! We had to creep in under curfew! To get it on wax for you!"

Tunes from the new album, especially "My All Time Doll" and "Sulphur To Sugarcane," became considerably more lively onstage, thanks to the wake-up slap that Costello's eternally underrated stage presence always gives an unsuspecting crowd, and a nimble six-piece backing band that included fiddle, dobro, stand-up bass, accordion, and mandolin. On acoustic guitar and back-up vocals, country artist Jim Lauderdale rounded out Costello's still-youthful delivery with nicely aged twang. Costello—a man who's always worked in a bit of everything—gave the audience some fine reminders that he's been trying to write country and blues songs for a long time. He used "Blame It On Cain" (from his 1977 debut album, My Aim Is True) to inject his invigorating bitterness into the set early on, and a few numbers later, the ballad "Indoor Fireworks" still came off as one of the most tender, raw songs ever written from a relationship's breaking point.

He also dug into traditional songs and country standards, at one point following Merle Haggard's "Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down" with his own drinking song, Sugarcane's "Down Among The Wine And Spirits." But it wasn't all predictable: The band waltzed through a country re-arrangement of The Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale," and the title track of Costello's 2004 album The Delivery Man became more suspenseful in the absence of drums. Speaking of suspense, the song "Complicated Shadows" had tons of it on 1996's album All This Useless Beauty, but the newly arranged version (as heard on Sugarcane) chugged along steadily and stamped all the life out of the song. (Though as a bonus, dramatic lighting pointed up at the musicians threw huge shadows on the curtain behind them, and also made Costello look like he had huge comical devil eyebrows for a few minutes.) "Mystery Dance," from My Aim Is True, also fell victim to Costello's current Americana phase rather than mesh with it—originally a saucy rockabilly song about trying to have sex for the first time and failing hysterically, it turned into a pleasant but humorless progressive-bluegrass kind of thing here.

After the set proper closed with "Brilliant Mistake" (further proof that Costello still has awesome taste in his own songs), the band lumbered through two encores, alternately rocking (a fun version of The Rolling Stones' "Happy") and dramatic (a slow, sad version of "The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes"). The band alternately charged and wandered toward the finish in the second encore with "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, And Understanding," suggesting that while young, angry Elvis and 55-year-old Elvis don't always work perfectly together, they're not all that different in spirit.