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Old 03-27-2011, 01:40 PM   #195 (permalink)
Bulldog
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: UK
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rainard Jalen View Post
LOVE this thread. Costello has recently become my favourite artist ever.
Cheers pal. It's always good to know people actually read stuff I've done here.

So then, let's get to the meat of this eh

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rainard Jalen View Post
I feel that a mere 6/10 for Armed Forces however is reprehensible. You seem to have a particular vendetta against that album that I don't feel fairly reflects its merits. Sure thing, I agree wholeheartedly that of EC's first five "proper" albums AF is certainly the weakest. But I can see no justification for saying it is anything less than "very good". AF should have been an 8.
What I don't think I said in that review is that I didn't give that 6 to AF lightly. It was, after all, the first Costello album I ever bought, and thus the one that got me started towards collecting the discography, reading the books and eventually making this thread. As you can imagine, it's a very important album to me, even if I don't like it as much as other albums.

I know plenty of people love that album and that I'm in a minority with my take on it, but to me it suffers from the same key pitfall that a lot of other out-and-out stabs at a high chart position does, that being that the singles are fantastic but surrounded (mostly in this case) by more mediocre numbers. Busy Bodies, Chemistry Class, Green Shirt, Moods For Moderns - a few album-only cuts that I think drag the album down.

True, that review's going to be three years old come November, but I stand by giving it a 6 to this day.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rainard Jalen View Post
And This Year's Model, while a no-brainer 10/10 in my books, should at least have been a 9 in yours.

Shame! To shame!
It would've been, but there are a lot of Costello albums I listen to more and prefer to it though. And I didn't really want to go around dishing out 9s and 10s with this thread any more like confetti than I already have. It's also worth mentioning that .5 ratings aren't a lot to do with any of that Pitchfork bollocks, but something I resort to when I'm too torn between two ratings to decide on one or the other.
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