The night is dressed like noon

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

08/04/22 : Unlimited Love - Red Hot Chili Peppers




I don't mind RHCP, but I can't help but feel their glory days are well and true behind them, so I'm struggling to imagine any other scenario in which I'd have bothered listening to this.  But you never know, I might love it.

Hmmm.  Well, I didn't hate it - but it did all feel very inessential to me and I struggle to remember any of it except for "Not The One" which is a surprisingly middle-of-the-road ballad, which wasn't at all what I was expecting.  I was also somewhat surprised to hear them namecheck The Thompson Twins in the same verse as Thin Lizzy and Led Zeppelin on "Poster Child", which seems like an odd musical combination - although it's funny when you remember how popular The Thompson Twins were back in the day.  They played the US section of Live Aid with Madonna - how weird is that when you think about it now?!?  Anyways, back to RHCP, I'm also very unconvinced by the album cover - it just looks a bit crap. 

We're at #1 in the charts this week with a new entry - the only one in the top ten with the next one being French The Kid at #21, who I can tell you absolutely nothing about.  All in all, it's an odd top ten with four of the albums having been in the charts for over 100 weeks - Eminem's Curtain Call greatest hits at #8 has 508 weeks now!

Wikipedia tells me that both John Frusciante and Rick Rubin are back for this album - this is John's third go on the RHCP merry-go-round and I know lots of people view him as the essential cog in the machine, but I haven't listened to any of their albums since Stadium Arcadium which was the last one he was on (way back in 2006!) so I can't really comment as to whether they've rediscovered the magic with him.  The critics basically liked it, although there are quite a few comments along the lines of "it's not the most memorable" but it went down well with the public, getting to #1 in quite a few countries, including the US.

"Customers also listened to" Foo Fighters, The Offspring and The Black Keys - all bands with similarities to and differences from RHCP.  As I said, I didn't hate this but there's absolutely no chance of me revisiting it and I suspect I won't be alone in this view - it will be interesting to see where it is next week on the charts.  I'll stick with Californication, thank you.

01/04/22 - Some high quality dairy produce
15/04/22 - I really liked 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