Send Sally to the sandbox, baby

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

02/10/20 : Ultra Mono - Idles


I know lots of people like Idles, but I am not one of those people (see also - Sleaford Mods).  They're just a bit too shouty for my delicate ears and I find it extremely unlikely this is going to change my mind - but I'll give it a go anyway.

No, it didn't - I actually didn't generally mind the music and thought there was more skill involved than I was expecting, but I just can't get with the vocal delivery.  At least it's only 42 minutes, I guess.  It's possible I might have enjoyed it during my angry young man phase (which lasted for approximately five minutes some time in the mid eighties) and I can see it will fill a need for some, but not me at this stage of my life, I'm afraid.  Now, where are my pipe and slippers?  I was intrigued by the album cover though - apparently it's a guy being hit in the face by a large pink ball (which represents love) done in the style of Caravaggio.  Obviously.

We're at #1 with a new entry again - as has been the case every week this year so far, but won't be next week!  Idles managed three weeks on the charts before disappearing and the other new entries in the top ten are a decidedly odd mix - Machine Gun Kelly (#3), The Deftones (#5), Joji (#6) and Slade (#8).  We also have Prince's Sign O' The Times as a re-entry at #7 and Michael Kiwanuka climbing 74 places to #4, so some very odd things were going on this week.

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album which says surprisingly little.  Unsurprisingly, the critics loved it - I was somewhat nostalgic to see a review from Q included in there (Google it, kids).  The album did surprisingly well across Europe though and even made it to #54 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" a load of people I've never heard of, but I suspect I'm safe assuming I won't like them.  Just not for me, I'm afraid!

25/09/20 - Well, I didn't hate it
09/10/20 - Not sure I see the point to this

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