It all can change before you know its gone

Continuing my trip back through the 2006 album charts.

22/10/06 : Undiscovered - James Morrison

In my head, I blame James Morrison (along with Daniel Bedingfield) for all the completely unnecessary male singer-songerwriters that hang around the charts these days - absolutely in touch with their feelings but absolutely pointlessly so.  Am I being fair?

Having listened to this I have to say that no, I'm not.  This isn't a bad album at all - "You Give Me Something" and "Wonderful World" are very decent tracks indeed, but they're all pretty well created.  There's something Stevie Wonderish about his voice and he conveys his emotions well - yes, it's all a bit dinner party-ish, but there's also enough there for the kids as well.  It does possibly go on ten minutes too long - it feels like it's running out of steam at the end but, all in all, this was a far better effort than I was expecting.  In future I will attempt to just blame Mr Bedingfield for the current crop of crooners (until I get to listen to one of his albums and realise he's not to blame either).  He's definitely going for the Chris Martin look on the cover though, isn't he?

We're at #4 in the charts this week on his twelfth week of a 67 week run having spent the first two weeks at #1 - good effort, lad!  And he managed another 30 weeks across six more runs, last being seen in August '09.  The rest of the top five this week were The Killers, Scissor Sisters, Razorlight and Snow Patrol - that's a better selection than last week, isn't it?  And the rest of the top ten is pretty decent too - Evanescence, The Fratellis, Paolo Nutini, Lily Allen and Luther Vandross.  It's weird how one week can make such a difference.  There are no new entries in the top ten - our highest is P Diddy (or whatever he was called back then) at #11 and I suspect I can live without that.

Wikipedia has remarkably little on the album other than how successful it was - #24 in the US and #10 on the year end chart in the UK which was much better than I remembered it had done.  "Customers also listened to" the Daniels Bedingfield and Merriweather, Newton Faulkner and James Bay - all of whom are the kind of people I was complaining about at the beginning.  But I have to admit that this album was a lot better than I was expecting - I won't be rushing back to it, but it was all perfectly listenable and the good tracks were very good indeed.

15/10/06 - Perfectly fine and perfectly unnecessary
29/10/06 - All a bit of an unnecessary mess

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