Rank the Records: Armed Forces

This is where it gets tricky. 

I think the received consensus among Elvis Costello fans is that his first five records are untouchable. They may even ascend to a level of perfection that he has yet to reach since. 

It is a remarkable run: My Aim Is True, This Year’s Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy!!, and Trust. Think of Elton John’s run of releases from 1970’s Elton John to 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Or the pace the Beatles managed to keep up for most of their career. Not just incredible albums, but a series of them, recorded and released at a rate of at least one per year, with a diversity of styles that remains pretty staggering. And evolution! Every album seemed to be a step ahead of the last. 

But this isn’t an exercise in explaining why every Elvis Costello album is the best Elvis Costello album. No, we have to rank these puppies. Which is why I must admit that of those five albums, Armed Forces may be my least favorite. 

I don’t know that I would have said so before I actually had to rank them. I’ve always been happy to hear it, and there are a clutch of EC’s all-time greatest tracks here, from “best-of” fodder like “Accidents Will Happen” and “Oliver’s Army” to untouchable deep cuts like “Party Girl” and “Moods for Moderns.” 

But listening to it closely, and required to compare it against all of EC’s work, Armed Forces feels…small. Not just in its sound, but also in its worldview. 

Costello’s working title for Armed Forces was “Emotional Fascism.” That’s a potent phrase, and you can hear that idea in many of the lyrics on the final album. It suggests a view of human relationships as oppressive obligations, in which one of the participants has to always seek domination, and the other will inevitably have no real control. Or it illustrates how the most successful oppression involves an emotional reaction, whether that’s national pride or national fear. There has to be an “other,” there has to be exclusion. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature. 

Never before had Costello set the endpoints of his moral compass so clearly, and so far apart. It’s literate, but it feels extreme. Especially as a few songs sit under the looming clouds of WWII and holocaust metaphors, likely never far from the mind of a writer who grew up in the aftermath of the war in Britain. 

Maybe this rigid, reductive view of human relationships is the only logical endpoint to Costello’s early musical persona. From the start, he was a highly literate lyricist, writing songs full of unexpected double meanings and analogies, rubbing up against naked emotional revelations. The “revenge and guilt” approach frequently utilized shock value for a response, and there’s little more extreme than comparing a love affair to the ravages of a still-rememberd war. 

“Two Little Hitlers” makes the metaphor explicit, and actually works well as an illustration of the push and pull between two lovers who seek control instead of understanding. In other places, the touch is a little more deft; sometimes it’s just a brief fleeting flash of dead-black haze before returning to the more mundane foibles of boys and girls. 

From a production and arrangement standpoint, Armed Forces may be his most “new wave” and “contemporary” album, heavy on synths and a tight processed drum sound. He and Steve Nieve have confessed plenty of times in interviews to patterning the infectious piano riffs of “Oliver’s Army” on ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

But it’s interesting to consider Armed Forces in the context of his discography; right before, This Year’s Model brought the noise and sneer of pub-soaked punk, and immediately after, Costello and the Attractions dodged modern sounds entirely for the Motown/Stax warmth of Get Happy!! And then, he was off to the races; he’d record in so many styles, with so many approaches, but never again in a way that so closely mirrored his peers on the radio. 

Ultimately, EC’s sound and worldview would become more expansive from here; compassion would emerge alongside bile, and the Attractions would mature into a broad palette versus a blunt tool. Armed Forces represents the last moment where it seemed easy to characterize Elvis Costello. From here, he took a torch to the map and led the way into uncharted territory. 

Rank the Records is a recurring feature at That Fatal Mailing List, where we dig into one of Elvis Costello’s 32 studio albums (according to Wikipedia) and I provide a completely subjective opinion on how they rank against each other. What’s my favorite EC record? What’s my seventeenth-favorite EC record?! Find out as we…RANK THE RECORDS (TM).

6. My Aim Is True (1977)

11. This Year’s Model (1978)

15. Armed Forces (1979)