Oh, I just can't pretend any longer

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

02/06/96 : Gabrielle - Gabrielle


I like Gabrielle's voice, but I've always had the suspicion that, in terms of song quality, she's been trading on the past heights of "Dreams" and never got anywhere close to this afterwards.  But we'll see, shan't we?

I take it all (well, some of it, anyway) back - "Give Me Just A Little More Time" does get close to "Dreams".  It's got a real 60s Motown flavour to it and you can imagine one of their classic vocalists (either male or female) giving a good go - so much so that I assumed it was a cover, but it was written by Gabrielle and her usual songwriting team.  Her version of an officially classic (if not Motown) track, "Walk On By" is not great though - not terrible, but not great.  I did like the opening track and the closing track though - but since they're the same track ("Forget About The World") that's not such a surprise.  The rest of it is fine but not a lot more than that, I'm afraid.  And it's another unowned album - 9/31.

We're at #11 with a new entry this week on the start of an 11 week run - it then took a couple of months off and came back for a four week run.  And it then took a couple of weeks off and came back for its most successful run - 23 weeks.  But it never made it any higher than #11 - all very odd.  The top five this week are George, Alanis, The Fugees, Oasis (in their last week of a 35 week run in the top 5) and the Manics - with no new entries in the top ten, so Gabrielle is the highest one this week, with the next one being Ice T (#26) which I can definitely live without.

Wikipedia has an entry on the album which consists of three sentences so I'm none the wiser,  other than being slightly surprised it sold as many as 300k copies.  Given the lack of information, I checked out her entry and can tell you she had a one year old at the time of this album's release - so quite how she managed to do anything is beyond me.  She also released an album last year as well, so she's still hanging in there.

"Customers also listened to" Beverley Knight (far superior vocally imho), Dina Carroll and Atomic Kitten - a slight drop off in quality there methinks.  Gabrielle has a nice voice though and it was nice to be reminded of "Give Me Just A Little More Time" but apart from that there wasn't a lot here to drag me back.

26/05/96 - Just a bit meh for me
09/06/96 - Fine, I guess

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