Broadsheet

Costello and the Impostors put on a dazzling two-hour-plus, 30-song-plus show, a tour de force performance by one of the greatest rock bands in the world. They were lean, fast and powerful -- not a trace of age-related fatigue -- and they were also extraordinary tight.

It's amazing that the band can sound so tight even with the presence of a wild card like mad-scientist keyboardist Steve Nieve, who keeps up a steady barrage of fevered ornamentation and gloriously over-the-top flourishes. That they do is largely thanks to Pete Thomas, one of the great rock drummers of all time, with an amazing, jittery, ahead-of-the-beat feel -- it's as if he's always rushing, but by some strange trick of space/time relativity, staying perfectly in time.

The Impostors played many of the songs from 2004's "The Delivery Man," Costello's best record in years, but they also ranged through that inexhaustible catalog of songs, playing hits like "Radio Radio," "Watching the Detectives," "Pump It Up" and "Peace, Love and Understanding," as well as more obscure gems like "Kinder Murder," "Clown Strike" and "Hurry Down Doomsday."

Even when the band played Costello hits from the '70s, the versions they played were often radically reimagined, and always performed with passion and ferocity and without pandering to the crowd. I was reminded of something Costello had said in his interview earlier in the day, that he was trying to make music without nostalgia. And it occurred to me that in all of his recent music, however bad some of it has been (and some of it has been very bad indeed), he's been succeeding at that not inconsiderable task. The only artists of comparable endurance and stature I could think of who have managed to keep their music so fiery, full of vitality and free of nostalgia, are Bob Dylan and Neil Young -- certainly rarefied company.