the UK Singles Chart in March. "Accidents Will Happen" was issued as a single on 4May, backed by "Talking in the Dark" and "Wednesday Week", and peaked at number 29 in the UK. Critical reception Armed Forces received positive reviews from music critics on release. Murray hailed the record as containing "some of the best rock music we'll hear this year" in NME, while a writer in The Observer cited it as "an album you just can't ignore". The Guardians Robin Denselow named Armed Forces the "first important album" of the year, and referred to it as musically "Costello's most relaxed, mellow and gentle album yet". In the Los Angeles Times, Robert Hilburn named Armed Forces the best album at mid-year in July 1979. Citing it as Costello's "most compelling" album yet, Hilburn described it as "a feverish, unflinching approach" that is a cross between the "social fury of John Lennon's first two solo albums" and the "haunting dissection of Bob Dylan's choicest works". The Washington Posts Geoffrey Himes also compared Costello's lyrical strategy of placing harsh ideals into more seductive settings with Dylan's break from the folk rock movement in the mid-1960s. In his review of Armed Forces, Himes singled out "Accidents Will Happen" as "the kind of high point that marks a great era of music". The same publication's Eve Zibart described Armed Forces as Costello's "third and most polished album [that] stakes out New Wave's first major fiefdom in the United States". Writing for Rolling Stone, Janet Maslin felt the album was a "killer in several senses of the word", remarking on the brief, energetic songs with dense and sometimes overly clever but snappy lyrics. Maslin felt that Costello "wants to be daring, but he also wants to dance". Meanwhile, The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau felt Costello was using words to "add color and detail to his music" rather than as "a thinking, feeling person", though he approved of the "intricate pop constructions" and found the album overall to be "good" but not "great". Both reviewers felt that the album was more densely or richly produced than its two predecessors. Other reviewers compared Armed Forces to its two predecessors, including Ira Robbins of Trouser Press, who considered it inferior to the "supercharged bite" of This Year's Model, but nevertheless deemed it a good record in its own right. On the lyrics, Robbins found that they "suffer