Old man's tears for a young man's dreams

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

14/05/21 : Life By Misadventure - Rag'n'Bone Man


I like the guy's voice and, when I've caught him being interviewed, I like the guy as well - he comes across all 'umble like.  I'm really not convinced by the facial tattoos - but it's his face and if that's what’s he wants to do with it, then who am I to stop him?  Overall, I was expecting to like this though.

And well, hmmm.  It's all a bit underwhelming really.  The songs are "nice" and his voice is "fine", but there's no "Human" on there, certainly - "All You Ever Wanted" stood out for me, but I suspect this was only because I already knew it.  All in all, it's pretty harmless and I felt I wanted to be challenged a bit more by it.

We're straight in at #1 this week - the third week in a row we've had a new entry at #1 and, somewhat amazingly, I'm going to say the same thing for the next 14 weeks.  And the run is only stopped by a re-entry at #1 and then we have a couple more weeks where it happens - it's odd how when I were a lad it was rare for an album to come straight in at #1 and now it almost seems like it's rarer for it not to happen.  Other new entries in the top 10 this week are Michael Ball (#2 - I suspect I can live without that in my life), Dodie (#3 - which I listened to because I thought I'd like someone called Dodie.  And I did!), Squid (#4) and Van Morrison (#5 - and I can certainly live without that).   A top 5 of newness is unusual though.

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album - the critics were somewhat divided between "nice" and "merely nice".  The album did surprisingly well across Europe though - top 10 in quite a few countries.

"Customers also listened to" Pink (only because of the duet, I suspect), Tom Grennan and Lewis Capaldi (who are much closer musically to the man).  Overall, this album is perfectly fine and there's very little on there to dislike - but that left feeling there was a lot less to like there than I was expecting.

07/05/21 - An album I totally fail to describe
21/05/21 - A mostly enjoyable mess

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