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
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.
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.