Red red desert, heal our blues

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

03/04/20 : C A L M - 5 Seconds Of Summer


This ain't gonna be my kinda thing, I'm suspecting - not hateful, but just a bit bland is my overall impression of the lads.

And yeah, that went down without touching the sides - nothing wrong with it but I can't tell you anything about it.  If you like this sort of thing, then you'll already love it - and tbh I'm very surprised that you do because it doesn't seem like your sort of thing.  I'm not judging you though (much).  For the rest of us, we're fine without it in our lives.

We're at #1 with a new entry this week - they managed five weeks before dropping out.  The other new entries in the top ten were Dua (#2 - and 110 weeks later, she's still in the top 20), Skepta/Chip/Young Adz (#3 - I started listening to this by mistake and it's not nearly as dreadful as I was expecting), Pearl Jam (#6 - I'm intrigued as to what this sounds like) and PartyNextDoor (#7 - I'm not in the slightest bit intrigued by this though).

Wikipedia has a lot more on the album than I was expecting - 221 milliPeppers.  And, surprisingly, some of it is actually quite interesting.  So I learned the weird title is because it's an acronym of all their names - awww, how cute.  It also tells me the lads were inspired by industrial music whilst writing it - I'd have to say that totally passed me by.  And it charted in the US a week before it was released because someone sent 11,000 copies over there by mistake.  The thing that interested me most though was something that wasn't actually explained - "Teeth" has writing credits for the members of New Order.  What?  It took some Google detective work to find out why - and it's not something you'd guess.  Apparently they wrote Rihanna's "Shut Up And Drive" (which seems like it needs further detective work, but I couldn't be arsed) and 5SOS nicked a bit of it for "Teeth".

Anyways, back to the album - the critics were surprisingly kind to it and the public loved it with it getting to #2 in the US, which somewhat surprised me.  "Customers also listened to" One Direction and various solo albums by One Direction members - which doesn't massively surprise me.  And, as with 1D, there's nothing wrong with this album except for the fact that it's all just totally wrong.  I'm sure they'll survive with me not loving it though.

27/03/20 - No, I can't
10/04/20 - An undeniably fine album

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