Let's spread our wings and fly away

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

04/02/96 : Deliverance - Baby D


I remembered the name Baby D, but couldn't have told you what they did without checking - ah yes, "Let Me Be Your Fantasy" which got to #1 in 1994.  There were a couple of other singles which I vaguely remembered enjoying, so I was quite looking forward to this.

But, for the most part, I'm afraid I'll have to stay looking forward to it.  Both Amazon and Spotify only have five of the twelve tracks and, unusually, even YouTube isn't offering me up a low quality version to endure.  So I listened to the five tracks (three of which were the singles) and enjoyed them, although the version of "Let Me Be Your Fantasy" was unnecessarily extended.  If you like that track, then there's no reason why you won't like the rest of it - but quite why the whole album isn't available is unclear (I'm assuming it's something to do with samples and rights issues).  It's also not available in our house - 12/48 (25% - and it's not looking likely that we've going to stay above that level!)

We're at #5 with a new entry this week at the start of a four week run - I don't think we've had too many with that short a run this year, whereas it happens all the times these days.  The rest of the top five were Oasis, Alanis, Pulp and Radiohead - a pretty fine selection of albums (although Oasis, hasn't aged as well as the others).  There are no other new entries in the top ten - the next highest is the best of The Beat (#13), who'd split up in 1983.

Wikipedia only talks about the critical reception for the album, which was good - and that's really all it says.  So I had a look at their entry as well and I learned that Baby D (the person, not the whole  group) was (and still is) married to Phil Fearon who you may remember from Galaxy in the early 80s.  But I think it's fair to say that Wikipedia is not exactly a goldmine of information on anything to do with the album or the group.

"Customers also listened to" Rozalla, 187 Lockdown and Pianoman - who I may recognise if I heard any of their stuff, but the names aren't ringing any bells with me at the minute.  Which is exactly what happened for Baby D, but I was pleased to be reminded about them - and a bit disappointed the whole album wasn't available.

28/01/96 - Some enjoyably odd noises
11/02/96 - Not great, but not terrible

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