Perfectly balancing the raw energy of My Aim Is True with the more elegant pop songwriting that would come to characterize much of his later work, This Year’s Model is not only Costello’s best work, but one of the most distinctively brilliant albums ever to be released. For fans of rock music bursting with wit and character, it really just doesn’t get any better than this.
~Matt LeMay (pitchfork.com)
My favourite Costello album was released 17 March 1978 – 37 years ago today.
But only love can break your heart
Try to be sure right from the start
Yes only love can break your heart
What if your world should fall apart?
–
… the sublimely lovely songs like “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” which went into the Top 40 in 1970. And its success probably did not discourage the songwriter from recording the largely acoustic Harvest and its number one single, “Heart of Gold,” a year later. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is the sort of song that is at once inimitable in style and yet almost universal in appeal and sentiment — perhaps to the point of seeming trite; the words are sort an update of sort on Tin Pan Alley songs like “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” and the wistful melody feels like it has also been around forever, though one would be hard-pressed to find it somewhere else.
~Bill Janovitz (allmusic.com)
