I'm high voltage, self-destructive

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts.

25/03/22 : Crash - Charli XCX



I'm a bit of a fan of the female singer/songwriter, dance-y thang and I'm aware of Charli and like her stuff without thinking it's top of that musical genre (personally, I would go for La Roux, Little Boots or Marina before her), but I really can't help but admire the confidence shown by a 29 year old (who signed her first record deal 12 years ago!).  I'm expecting more of the same from this...

...and it pretty much delivers - as long as you play it loud enough!  "Good Ones" and "Beg For You" are both very fine tracks indeed - and the rest of the album is perfectly acceptable as well.  It's not exactly breaking new ground, but it's an enjoyable enough listen if you like this sort of thing (which I do!).  I'm not convinced the album cover is looking to make me go "ewww - that fingernail" though...

We're straight in at #1 this week and the other new entries in the top ten are Arrdee (#2), Sea Girls (#3), Feeder (#5 - their 11th album!) and Sam Tompkins (#7) - I suspect none of them will be hanging around for too long.  And certainly not as long as Eminem's greatest hits which is back in the top ten again in its 509th week in the charts (on a run of 274 weeks!).

Wikipedia has a lot on the album (240 milliPeppers) - which is a surprising amount for a new album.  I'd have to say it amounts to remarkably little though - Charli says "she's working on a new album", Charli says "a new album is going to be released", Charlie says "here's a new album".  Meow!  And then the critics say "yeah we like that" and the general public do the same - #1 in Ireland and Australia and #7 in the US, which is a particularly fine effort.

"Customers also listened to" Camilla Cabello, Years And Years, Ella Henderson and George Ezra - which is a slightly odd mix.  Charli continues to produce pop of the most interesting variety though - I can't say I'll be rushing back to this, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

01/04/22 - Some high quality dairy produce
18/03/22 - An indescribable but enjoyable experience

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more