Without a rhythm or rhyme

    

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

03/12/21 : Wild Dreams - Westlife



Well, I hadn't considered the possibility of this happening, I can tell you.  Hmmm - is it too late to change the rules?  To be fair, I'm not expecting this to be hateful - just blandness and key changes repeated X times (where X is 15, because Amazon only have the "Deluxe" version - oh goody).

And yeah, i guess it's fine if you like this sort of thing - which my mother-in-law does, so I can't be too rude about them (me?  RUDE?!?).  The main good news that comes out of this is that I can casually mention that my wife has seen them live - she claims it was because she was taking her mum for her birthday, but we know better, don't we?  I did listen to the whole album though - it helped that the last four tracks were live versions with a couple of covers in there, so that provided a bit more variety than I had previously experienced (although the voices on the live versions weren't quite as strong as I was expecting).  The rest of it mostly passed me by, except for "Alive" which I actively disliked with its disco nonsense - I'd also have to say "My Hero" struck me as peak Westlife (and so was amused to see it was written by Ed Sheeran).

This week in the chart we're back up to #2 (Adele was enjoying her second week at #1) - this album debuted there and started its slow decline from there (it's #78 this week, so I suspect that's the last we'll see of it).  And having been mildly rude about it, I'd have to say part of me was glad I had to listen to it, otherwise I'd have been made to suffer Gary Barlow's Dream Of Christmas - which I imagine is way worse.

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album but does tell me this - "Westlife recorded the album over an 18-month period".  18 months?!?  I just assumed they knocked this stuff out in their sleep - but no, there are 30 (THIRTY!) songwriters involved on this album (and no, that doesn't include the cover versions).  Westlife's Wikipedia entry is actually quite interesting because it reminds you exactly how huge they were - there are some mad statistics on there.

"Customers also listened to" Shane Filan, Kian Egan, Nicky Byrne and Markus Feehily - never heard of any of 'em.  Going back to Westlife, I suspect the members of the group (whoever they are) are perfectly happy sitting on their massive piles of cash without my adoration so we're all content with the situation as it is - specifically, this album's not horrible but neither is it "my sort of thing".

26/11/21 - One for the super-fans only
10/12/21 - I didn't see this one coming

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