Give me a second, give me a minute

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

23/12/22 : SOS - SZA

Our second visit with SZA and last time I mostly enjoyed her general vibe and added one of her tracks to my general playlist so she's popped up from time to time in the intervening period.  I'm pretty certain this has to be the shortest artist/album name combinations we've seen - six characters is impressively brief (and three of them are S).  I'm looking forward to it though - I like her voice.

Yeah, it's pretty much what I expected and I liked it - although at 23 tracks running over 63 minutes, it was certainly longer than I was expecting (and much longer than most albums have been this year - 35-40 minutes has been the average).  I have to admit that there were one or two tracks that jumped out at me, but I didn't note down which ones they were and I'm not going to listen to it all again just to get their names.  Sorry, SZA - but they were all pretty decent (although less might have been more) and if you like her sound then you'll probably go for this.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on her second week, having debuted at #2 last week - the fact that she's hung around so well in Christmas week suggests that people have liked it a lot.  The rest of the top five are Taylor, Cliff Richard (who, according to the rules, I probably should be listening to but that was NEVER gonna happen), a little bit of Bublé and the Bocelli Family - all of which makes SZA's lofty position all the more impressive.

Wikipedia has quite a chunky entry which educated me on several fronts.  The album cover is based on a similar photo of Princess Diana (which I don't remember in the slightest, but I can quite imagine).  There are a LOT of names involved in the album, across a wide variety of genres - Travis Scott, Jacob Collier, Bjork, Lizzo, Sia, Ol' Dirty Bastard and Phoebe Bridgers are just some of the people I recognise (and there are plenty more, I can tell you).  The critics mostly liked it (although quite a few complained it was too long) and the general public loved it - #1 in the US and top five in a LOT of countries.

"Customers also listened to" Metro Boomin, Lucky Daye, Steve Lacy and Jacquees - yeah, this really ain't my genre.  But, even so, SZA does stand out from the crowd (and it's a BIG crowd) for me - I suspect if she'd got this out earlier she'd have been on quite a few "best of 2020" lists.

16/12/22 - Not terrible, but not for me
30/12/22 - The final #17 album of 2022

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