Quote:
Originally Posted by Bulldog
Along with Senior Service, Party Girl is easily my favourite non-single track on Armed Forces. It's just a really slick, smooth song, and that lyric's up there with my favourite that Costello's ever written - one of the finest, most miserable lovesongs I've ever heard. Big Boys is a very good song too, and doesn't sound bad by any stretch in its final presentation. I do think it would've benefitted more had it been recorded for This Year's Model though, as I reckon a punkier, more guitar-heavy method would've done it a world of good. Still a really good song all the same though.
And, yeah, Green Shirt's acoustic demo sounds much better than the version that made it onto Armed Forces. The latter version kinda stutters through its runtime, like the song's not really sure how it wants to deliver itself if you know what I mean. You can hear that there's a good song under the surface, but it really does sound very overproduced to me.
Another thing that bothers me about that album as a whole is that in Tiny Steps, Clean Money and Wednesday Week, there are some great songs that got left off it as well.
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Totally agree about Tiny Steps. I'd kinda wondered about that myself. At first I'd thought it was a non-album single or something. But I guess not. Either way, it's a hell of a lot better than Sunday's Best and Mood For Moderns.
I happen to think Busy Bodies has a great melody to it, though can understand your criticisms of the song.
As for Clean Money, I like that song a lot. Thankfully Elvis recycled its best lyrics for use on the brilliant Love For Tender. Similar to how he recycled Cheap Reward's lyrics on Lip Service.
OUT OF INTEREST, I'm having a lot of difficulty finding the full bonus track versions of Get Happy and Trust. As in, I could probably download them, but want the CDs. I have ONE of the bonus versions of Get Happy!, but want the HUGE one with the 50 tracks. That looks awesome. Have you heard it? I'm really curious about the demo versions of songs like Opportunity (such a great song). What is the Trust bonus disc like?
Every time I listen to Elvis I'll notice some brilliant lyric I never really noticed before. New Amsterdam: "Til I step on the breaks to get out of her clutches". What a f$cking clever piece of phrasemaking with the double meaning of clutch.
Eh. A bit of a schizophrenic message, but I just love Elvis so I say whatever pops into my head.