It's just a rumour that was spread around town

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

07/08/83 : Punch The Clock - Elvis Costello And The Attractions


Our third visit with Mr Costello and I have a sneaking suspicion that this is going to be much better received than the previous two - I like a lot of stuff he's done over the years but I also find a lot of it pretty tiresome, however from what I can gather from a sneak peak at the track listing, this has a far better quality/dross ratio.

And yeah, I really liked this - "Every Day I Write The Book", "Shipbuilding" and "Pills And Soap" are all very fine tracks indeed (I own the latter as a single) but the rest of the album didn't suffer a noticeable dip in quality.  I don't feel the need to say a lot more about it - if you know the classic Elvis Costello sound, this has it in spades.  If you don't, then check it out - what's the worst that can happen?  It is however, another album that neither of us own (although I believe I came close to buying it, but I think the album cover put me off) - we slip further to 8/21, which I can tell you is our new historic low of 38% because the slide will be (at least temporarily) halted next time around.

We're at the lofty heights of #3 in the charts this week - his second week out of a run of a 13 week run, after which it was never seen again.  This was the album's highest placing - bizarrely, it debuted in the previous week at #63, for which I suspect there was some reason that I'll never uncover.  Above it in the charts were The Beach Boys and Jacksons compilations - I'll be glad to see the back of them (it'll happen soon, but not soon enough).  The highest new entry this week was Street Sounds 5 (which features a bizarre combination of artists including Freeez, Aretha and Kenny Lynch) at #28 - the highest "proper" new entry was Cabaret Voltaire at #31.

Wikipedia has pretty much nothing on the album other than noting (twice) that NME declared it the album of 1983 and yes, I can't see it's had too much competition in that arena in the year from the albums we've seen so far.  I was surprised to see it got to #24 in the US - this was probably due to college radio which had a bizarrely strong impact on the sales of a select few UK acts.

"Customers also listened to" Joe Jackson, XTC and Squeeze - a definite particularly English thread running through all of this lot.  And whilst this isn't quite enough to tear me away from just listening to Elvis' "best of", I found it far preferable to the late 70s stuff that Rolling Stone loved so much (This Years Model and My Aim Is True) - it's well worth checking out if you don't know it.

31/07/83 - Very happy to be reminded this existed
14/08/83 - A somewhat underwhelming listen

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