My friends got their ladies - they're all having babies

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

22/09/96 : Older - George Michael


Woah - we've had a bit of a step up in quality recently, haven't we?  This is another album I know reasonably well and I was quite surprised that we didn't see it in the Rolling Stones exercise - Faith was his only entry there and I think there's a good argument this is a way better album.

Just look at the evidence presented up front - "Jesus To A Child", "Fastlove" (which features some very fine sax work I'd never noticed before), "Older" and "Spinning The Wheel".  That's a very decent start to an album, isn't it?  There's an argument that the quality then dips to merely "really still very good" - until "Star People" and "You Have Been Loved" anyway.  It's an older and more world-weary George - he'd been through a lot in the years since his preceding album.  It's also bizarre to think his sexuality was a matter of rumour at this time - what a long time ago that feels now (and it's just mad that he hasn't been with us for over five years now).  And this is another we own this one (courtesy of Mrs Reed at the time, but I suspect I would have bought it once I'd heard it) - the upward trend continues to 4/15.

We're at #8 in the charts this week in his 19th week of a 94 week run and he managed another 22 weeks across 4 runs before disappearing in 1997.  And it was, of course, re-released in 2017 and managed another 5 weeks.  The top five in the chart this week were Kula Shaker, Jamiroquai, REM, The Fugees and Space (a new entry, which would have been this week's choice if we hadn't already met it on #AOTD).  No other new entries in the top ten this week - the next ones are the slightly bizarre juxtaposition of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing (#17) and the best of Jim Reeves (#22 - the man had been dead for 32 years at this time).

Wikipedia has a well-deserved 193 milliPeppers on the album - and there's quite a bit of backstory there about his contract dispute which preceded this release.  It was well received globally (6 million sales), although Wikipedia claims that it didn't do so well in the US (but it still got to #6).  There's a very bizarre comment about the performance of "Star People" as a single, noting it was kept off the top by Gary Barlow - "the very man who some say he (George) is trying to emulate".  WHAT?!?

"Customers also listened to" Gravier, Julia Holter and Toby Bourke - errr, OK.  I'm not entirely sure what's going on there, but I won't be bothering to check them out.  I don't visit this album often - Ladies & Gentlemen (his best of) is my normal George destination of choice, but I think this is my favourite studio album of his and it was a pleasure to spend some time with.

15/09/96 - Another fine revisit
29/09/96 - I might be biased here

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