Ah, my favourite album when I was a teen. I've probably listened to it more than any other single album ever. Am I about to go all contrarian and try to claim it's overrated? It's not! Believe the hype! Are there better albums from the 90s, better albums that came out in 1997, even? Of course, but it might still hold the top spot in my heart, even 3 decades on.
Listening to this the whole way through for the first time in probably a decade, I notice that this feels like an album that was meant for vinyl, with a clear side-A and side-B feel to it. Side B much less cohesive.
- This is a very uneven album - high highs and low lows
- I like the fiddle - why did they lose that?
Listening to this album for the first time in 2026, I feel like someone who’s never seen The Wizard of Oz, all like “ohhh now I get that reference”. You mean to tell me charming social media personality Flavor Flav really does say “yeaaahh boyyyy!” just like that, over and over??
Opening and closing tracks are all-timers, everything else is pretty meh
I love Elliott Smith and am deeply grateful I never discovered him when I was in high school because I feel like he would have made me even more insufferable. Even now, I hear a line like "When they clean the street, I'll be the only shit that's left behind" and my fingers itch to scrawl it in the margins of my math notebook.
[ELECTROCHEMISTRY] Oh man. He looks so devastatingly *cool* with that cigarette.
(Seriously this album cover is like the height of 90s cool. The typewriter font, Heli-Jet hat, monochrome tattoo, cigarette, "fuck you" penned on the wall behind him...)
- Why is the title track so long, jeez
- This is a very horny album that’s also profoundly unsexy, a bad combo
- Wikipedia tells me many of the songs on this album were written for a musical, which tracks. I don’t think you should be legally allowed to have cover art of a dude riding a flying motorcycle out of hell in the middle of a graveyard, when the album itself is mostly melodramatic show tunes.
The longer this album went on, the less I liked it
The more I listened to this, the more I enjoyed it. Very solid album.
I've listened to this album a lot. It's too long but so it goes with Daft Punk albums.
This sounds like XTC tried to make a Talking Heads tribute album as a weekend project
Listened to this album a lot back when it came out. Still pretty solid.
Half these songs are Can-con classics, the rest I didn’t know and seem kinda meh. Would I feel the same about the whole album if it didn’t give me classic rock radio nostalgia?
I dunno, it’s fine I guess? If I was at a party or a wedding and someone put this on, I wouldn’t object.
Bleak, melancholy. I don't really want to write a "meh, boring"-style review but this album leaves me little choice. It just doesn't stand out for me.
A lot of Elvis Costello albums have a handful of absolute classics, interspersed with a lot of boring filler. So it goes with Armed Forces too - "Oliver's Army" and "Two Little Hitlers", for example, among my favourite Costello tracks but there's also a lot of songs I almost never bother listening to (looking at the track listing I can barely conjure up what "Green Shirt" or "Chemistry Class" sound like).
One of the only bad things about this album is that is was followed, less than a year later, by "Arthur", which is in the running for my favourite album of all time, so I inevitably compare them.
The other bad thing is that it's a bit rough and uneven, with a handful of clunkers especially on the second half (ex. "Phenomenal Cat").
