Everybody's in their cave, facing what we can't escape

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

11/06/21 : All The Colours Of You - James

James played one of the clubs when I was at Uni so they're doing well to still be hanging around (although Wikipedia tells me they did take a break from 2001-07).  I own Gold Mother (from 1990) and quite like it, but can't say I've followed their output in the intervening years.  They also managed to annoy me in the one time I've seen them live - it was a delayed start due to miserable weather on a grim Glasto morning and the one thing the sparse crowd desperately needed was to sing along to "Sit Down" and they played all their latest stuff first which no-one cared about.  And people let them know what they thought about such behaviour, so nobody went home happy.  Anyways, back to the current day - I was expecting this to sound like all the rest of their stuff (he says somewhat unfairly because I don't know 95% of their stuff)

And that's partially the impression I get - but it manages to sound both retro and reasonably modern at the same time.  I actually quite liked it - I struggle to imagine it will gain them too many new fans but it feels like their existing fanbase will be into it and I can't see there's a lot there for too many people to hate it if they stumbled across it.  I would say that no one track really stood out from the rest - but it was a competent and enjoyable set of tracks with a reasonable quality bar, if somewhat lacking highlights.

We're at #3 in the charts this week with Wolf Alice (a new entry at #1) and Olivia ahead of them - unsurprisingly they managed just the 2 weeks before disappearing from view but I was pleasantly surprised to see it was their sixth album to have made the top 3.  Other new entries in the top 10 this week are Lil Baby/Lil Durk (#5) and Crowded House (#6 for a band with a very similar career path to James).

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album (147 milliPeppers) - it seems like a fan got involved and decided to break down the meaning of each song.  Apparently the album was recorded with the band members in various countries - I certainly don't get any sense of disconnect but I guess that's to be expected these days.  The critics liked it - I can certainly go along with the comment that it is a "winning synthesis of James' anthemic tendencies and their instinctive weirdness".  It didn't exactly set the charts alight in many other countries though - except for Portugal where it got to #8.

"Customers also listened to" Inspiral Carpets, Shed Seven and The Charlatans - some fine names from back in the day all of whom lasted a lot longer than you might expect in some form or other (I'm a big fan of The Charlatans - their "best of" is well worth checking out).  Writing this up, I'm feeling like I've not given James enough attention over the years and I'm also thinking I'll listen to this again - I suspect it would benefit from another visit.  Check it out if you like that sort of thing from back in the day.

04/06/21 - An album I struggled to form an opinion about
18/06/21 - Better than I was expecting