There they go smokin' up the sky, yeah

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

21/01/73 : Crazy Horses - The Osmonds


What?!?  You have GOT to be fucking kidding me.  I'm being trolled by The Osmonds from 1973 - but there's nothing in the rules against it, so here we go again...

What?!?  I'm struggling to process it, but this isn't terrible.  I mean, it’s not great but it’s a million times better than Donny’s efforts.  It's all a bit of a musical magpie exercise - there are all sorts of things involved here.  At times it strays into Slade/T Rex glam rock territory, at other times there are shades of The Beatles, the title track is probably more Deep Purple than anything else and "Big Finish" is something out of The Benny Hill show.  So, taken on its own merits it’s a perfectly acceptable 70s thang which is odd, but surprisingly tolerable.

We're at #10 in the charts on their seventh week of a 16 week run, with it having peaked at #9.  The top five in this week were Slade, Gilbert, Simon & Garfunkel, the LSO and Carly and the highest new entry was James Last, all the way down at #19.  So, once again Carly is the highest lady and unfortunately she's all on her own again.

Wikipedia tells me this is a heavy metal album - I'm not entirely sure I can go along with that, but I am happy to agree it shares some elements and possibly influenced others who came after, but I feel that saying it's "particularly significant in the evolution of heavy metal music" may be overstating matters.  It's not my area of expertise though, so I'm happy to be told I'm wrong by others who are wiser in such matters.  That's about all it has to say - it got to #14 in the US, so did OK for them I guess.

"Customers also listened to" - yup, other Osmondalia and David Cassidy but we also see The Sweet and The Bay City Rollers as well this time.  I didn't lurve this, but I did like bits of it and it's way better than anything else we've seen this year that features that name.  The only chink of relief is that I’ve not had to suffer anything from Jimmy - and yes, I realise I’ve not checked what I’m getting for the last two weeks of the year yet…

14/01/73 - His fans must REALLY love him
28/01/73 - Some interesting sounds

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