25. Elvis Presley - Elvis Is Back! (1960)

1. Make Me Know It

2. Fever *

3. The Girl of My Best Friend *

4. I Will Be Home Again

5. Dirty, Dirty Feeling

6. Thrill of Your Love

7. Soldier Boy

8. Such a Night

9. It Feels So Right

10. Girl Next Door Went A-Walking

11. Like a Baby

12. Reconsider Baby *

B+

One of the fun things about listening to these albums exclusively, one at a time, and in order, is that I tend to appreciate them more. If I'd just popped Elvis is Back! on one day I probably wouldn't have cared much for it, but after several jazz and folk albums it was a real breath of fresh air. True, this is not a perfect album. It is, however, a pretty good one. There are a couple of duds but generally the song choices are good and they're all well-performed. There are even a couple of genuine classics.

My favourite song on the album is definitely the version of "Fever". It follows the Peggy Lee version pretty closely, but where Lee's is all coy, worldly sophistication, Presley's version just drips sex. Every copy sold should have come with a free pair of flame-retardant underpants. 

Right after that you have "The Girl of My Best Friend", which sees Elvis stretching himself a bit and recording a genuine pop song. And honestly, it's great. In a lot of ways it's just an ordinary teen pop song of the kind you'd expect of the Everly Brothers, but it has a great tune, Elvis nails the emotion of the song, and he really stretches himself as a vocalist (apparently he underwent vocal training during his downtime while in the Service with the explicit goal of broadening his range). The strange doo-wop backing by the Jordanelles which is omnipresent on this album also manages to avoid seeming out of place.

My third favourite song is probably "Reconsider Baby", which comes right at the end of the album and is a slow, gritty blues number at odds with the rest of the album. Apparently Elvis played lead guitar on this, and he's actually pretty good.

There are some other good songs here, too, I suppose. "Girl Next Door Went A-Walking" is pretty catchy, as is "Such a Night". But then there are those duds I mentioned. "Soldier Boy" is fine for what it is, but "I Will Be Home Again" and "The Thrill of Your Love" don't have much to recommend them. Nor do I have much fondness for "Like a Baby". You also have "Dirty, Dirty Feeling", which is a great rockabilly number musically but which has some decidedly non-PC lyrics about dragging women home and chaining them to the wall. I think it's all meant to be a joke but honestly it's not that funny. So I guess just listen to the music.

I haven't really gone through an album song by song before, but I guess that's because Elvis  Is Back! is very much an album in the sense of a collection of songs, rather than there being any real unifying theme. It's kind of an "everything but the kitchen sink" sort of album, dealing with all sorts of genres with moderate success. That said, the good stuff on here is really good, and the tracks are ordered so that there's plenty of variety when you listen through from start to end.  There's also a really great energy on this album. You can tell Elvis was excited, after two years in the Army, to be back in the studio and trying new things, even if those new things probably alienated a few of his fans. The result is an album that is immensely likeable. Even when it doesn't quite work, it's fun to have on just to experience its vibe.