scaryblog

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts. 21/10/01 : Love Is Here -  Starsailor Somewhat surprisingly, this is our second visit with Starsailor and it's also one we owned (taking us to two for the year) - I don't remember loving it, but there must have been a reason I bought it, so I'm interested to see what that reason might be. I liked "Alcoholic" and "Good Souls" (and believe they were the reason I bought the album) but the rest of the album is of a pretty similar standard - they're decent tracks which are performed well. Over the course of the whole album, the lead singer's voice does get a bit tiresome but it never quite gets too much so I think they just about get away with it. I remember there were plenty of comparisons with Coldplay at the time and it's definitely pretty Yellow -ish in places - it just didn't quite take off for them in quite the same way afterwards. Which I suspect comes down to the quality of their s...

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts. 28/10/01 : Cieli De Toscana -  Andrea Bocelli This is something I'd never normally listen to, but I understand why people love it and he's got a decent voice so I very much doubt I'm going to hate it. Also, somewhat surprisingly, this is the sixth of his albums that's been mentioned here so far, with quite a few top five new entries being unlucky to miss out to higher new entries and one being in line for a review but then I couldn't find it anywhere - so I definitely feel he deserves a write-up. Whether he gets the write-up he deserves is another matter, because all I've really got here is "nice". He's got a nice voice and they're nice songs, sung in Italian which is a nice language, so I really don't see how anyone could seriously object to it (except for Bono's contribution - that was bloody awful). I don't remember any of it and I'm never going to listen to it again, so ...

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 09/01/26 : Divide - Ed Sheeran Well, this is somewhat unexpected!  But I always think it's good to support lesser known, struggling artists, so let's see what sort of stuff the lad was churning out in '17 (a good ten years later than last week's album , at least).   I may, in the past (and also more than possibly in the future), have been slightly rude about Mr Sheeran but there's no denying that when he hits the sweet spot, he does it well. And there's plenty of places where he does that on here - I actively like "Castle On The Hill" and "Shape Of You" and, whilst I can tell he's trying to push people's buttons on "Perfect" and "Supermarket Flowers", I have to admit he does it well. There's also an acceptable level of musical magpieness going on here, with some of the songs borrowing from Latin and African rhythms, but not excessively so. But... ...th...

And 2025 bites the dust! Wow - there are an awful lot of albums here that I don't remember in the slightest and even fewer I remember liking (I'd suggest we're not far off single figures). It's also interesting how we've had some pretty unknown artists at various times whilst some bigger artists have completely missed out - it's all a case of how your release date aligns with (or more importantly) avoids other artists. The ownership ratio was obviously 0% but it's interesting to consider what it might have been if streaming wasn't an option - I reckon I might have bought five, the lovely Mrs Reed maybe two or three and my daughters maybe another couple, bringing us somewhere in the region of 20%. Except that, of course, if streaming didn't exist the chart would look massively different so it's a completely pointless exercise! Looking at the year-end chart of the "biggest" albums of the year, we see, somewhat unsurprisingly, that Taylor ...

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts. 04/11/01 : Invincible -   Michael Jackson Our fourth visit with Michael and I've never heard this - in fact, I don't think I even remembered it existed. I'm expecting it to be an interesting enough historical listen, but I'm not sure I'm going to exactly love it. Actually, this is surprisingly decent - it's got a reasonable amount of variety but it feels like someone's been trying to rein in some of his more outlandish ideas. And at least partially succeeding - yes, there's still an awful load of nonsense on here, but it's at least listenable nonsense. I was also particularly surprised by actively enjoying "Threatened", the closing track - although I was possibly just very pleased to get to the end of the 77 minutes, which really could have done with some pruning. I was also surprised how "The Lost Children" (which is psychological minefield I won't be investigating) stray...

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's  Top 50 TV Shows of 2024 #16 : Fallout  The Last of Us took a big step forward in rehabilitating the maligned video game adaptation genre, and this year’s Fallout represented another. Set in a hellish, heightened post-apocalyptic world, this was a story of mutants and zombies and lost innocence that managed to be cheekily knowing and genuinely gripping in equal measure. Some of this was down to the performances – Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell were particularly good – but a lot of it was down to plain old self-belief. More than anything, this was a show with absolute faith in its source material. I'd heard this was good, watched the first episode, enjoyed it - and then never watched any more of it. I think this was because the first episode was very much a scene setter, which looked particularly impressive but didn't really give you any clues where it was going, so I didn't feel massively invested.  And, to some extent, that comme...