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Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts. 03/11/17 : Scream Above The Sounds -  Stereophonics Our eighth visit with the 'phonics (keeping them level with the Manics) - it's fair so say their output has been variable, so who knows what we're getting here.  Hmmm - it's basically a Stereophonics album with the added "bonus" that they sometimes sound a bit bored with being who they are and they fancy being someone else. I noted down hints of Starsailor (quite often), Radiohead, jazz, yacht rock, Status Quo and The Sweet (which is quite the combination!) but there were plenty of other "oh, that reminded me of <X>" moments that I couldn't quite place. As a Stereophonics-agnostic I quite liked it as a "well, they're trying something a bit, but not too, different" effort so I'll be interested to read what the critics and fans thought of it. We're at #2 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a twe...

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts. 10/11/17 : As You Were -  Liam Gallagher Our third visit with Liam solo and our second visit with a Gallagher in a month - expectations are not high, but Noel managed to pleasantly surprise me, so you never know. Actually, this starts with "Wall Of Glass" which I knew I liked but I thought it was a Beady Eye track, so we're already ahead of the game. And taken, a track at a time, the rest of the album is decent enough (the singing isn't always great, but in other places it's way better than expected) - but there's not a huge amount of variety so I think you have to be a certain type of person to want a whole album of it. If you are that type of person, I'm sure you've already got this album so you'll be happy - it doesn't quite hit the spot for me but, and I can't stress this enough, this could have been far, far worse. We're all the way down at #8 in the charts this week on his fif...

Next! The Seer (1986) This is another one I purchased as soon as it came out - but, for some unclear reason, it was the last one of theirs I ever bought (maybe this journey will help me understand). I think I still like this album but I don't believe I've listened to it in decades, so it will be good to catch up with it. Side One 1. Look Away This is very much up their anthemic sing-along street - no complaints from me about that! 2. The Seer This is an interesting one - it features Kate Bush because she's not done a lot of collaboration over the years. I'd always wondered how it came about - but five seconds on the internet tells me that apparently they asked and she said "yes", so I guess that solves that mystery. Kate provides an interesting mix of sounds on this but hers and Stuart's voices work well together - I'm not sure we needed 5:25 of it though. 3. The Teacher This was the only track of the first side I didn't remember from the title alo...

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts. 17/11/17 : reputation -  Taylor Swift Our ninth visit with Taylor and this is one I've already rejected once because I just couldn't face two Taylor albums in a row - but I knew I was only delaying the inevitable. I'm expecting, as always, for this to be perfectly fine but completing mystifying as to why everyone loves it so much. Hmmm - from my point of view, I don't think I'd actually say this is perfectly fine because I found it quite boring. However, I can see that if you've grown up with Taylor and her "nice" stories of love and break-ups then maybe you feel like there's more to life now and this album kinda tries to move on a bit both musically and thematically (whilst still talking about love and break-ups as well). But as a Taylor-agnostic, I can't say I liked it - I still laughed at "the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now. Why? Oh… 'cos she's dead” thou...

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts. 24/11/17 : The Architect -  Paloma Faith On our last visit, Noel asked who built the moon and so here's Paloma giving a perfectly acceptable, if probably inaccurate, answer. This is our second visit with the lass - last time I was surprised at how bearable it all was, so here's hoping for more of the same. Yeah, this is all very bearable as well - it's got a reasonable amount of variety across the album and she throws herself into it all. It's not quite my sort of thing but if you're looking for something like Adele, Ellie Goulding or Ella Henderson, then I reckon you could do far worse than this. I wasn't expecting Samuel L Jackson to kick things off though! We're at a somewhat surprising #1 with a new entry on the start of an impressive 38 week run - and she followed that up with a further 11 week run a couple of months later, which you rarely see. The rest of the top five were  Sam Smith , Alfie Boe ...

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts. 01/12/17 : Who Built The Moon? -  Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds So this is our third visit with NGHFB and I might have mentioned that I really don't see why Noel feels the need to include his name in the band (even though I'm pretty sure it's not Noel who's responsible for such nonsense) and I'm also not convinced that later period Noel uses all the song writing skills he has previously deployed. But let's see where we are here, shall we? Hmmm. I actually liked this more than I was expecting - there are some decent tunes on it, although I'd struggle to say the same for the lyrics. But, the decent tunes are all very derivative - even I noticed that one of them sounds almost exactly like The Beatles' "Come Together" and I'm sure there must have been others similarly duplicated. So, I'm kinda pleased that Noel is introducing classic sounds to the youths - provided they go on t...