Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Continuing my trip back through the 2006 album charts.

17/12/06 : Eyes Open - Snow Patrol

I seem to recall quite liking Snow Patrol slightly before this time but then they got a bit ubiquitous around now which made it harder to love them - but given that things have been very quiet on the Snow Patrol front for many years, I suspect this should be a pleasant enough revisit.

And yeah, it certainly starts strongly with "You're All I Have", "Hands Open" and "Chasing Cars" all being very fine tracks indeed - and it was even nice to hear the latter after it having been everywhere for most of the end of this decade because it's a very fine song indeed.  I also particularly liked "Make This Go On Forever" and "Set Light To The Third Bar" with Gary's voice working well with Martha Wainwright's - but the whole album has a pretty high quality bar on it.  I can see that it would be easy for people to be sniffy about their jangly guitars and not exactly deep lyrics but for me it's a fine album by a band trying to make music that people will enjoy.  I also imagine their stadium sets were very enjoyable singalong sessions indeed.  And, this is another one we owned - 2/3 so far!

Somewhat surprisingly we're at #7 this week - I think the charts not separating out compilation albums yet is really going to make a difference in terms of how deep we have to dive some weeks.  They were on their 33rd week of an impressive 106 week run, having spent three separate weeks at #1 with it not leaving the top 20 until its 50th week.  And it then managed another 45 weeks over six more runs, last being seen in 2009.  Ahead of it this week, the top five are Take That, Oasis (a best of), Westlife, Il Divo (just no) and U2 (another best of) - I'll also mention The Beatles at #6 with Love, which is a bizarre remixed "best of" done for the Cirque de Soleil show, which claims to offer me a new experience, but I've certainly listened to enough Beatles so far to feel happy enough rejecting this.  Bizarrely, we only have one new entry this week as well (did no-one actually release new music in 2006?) and, quite obviously, it's the original cast recording of The Sound Of Music.

Wikipedia opens with the honest "Snow Patrol's primary aim for a fourth album was to create a better one than the previous, Final Straw" - I can't remember enough about Final Straw to know whether they managed better, but it was slightly more successful.  It's fair to say the album did quite well - best selling UK album of 2006, #11 in 2007, #99 in 2008 and even #181 in 2009, making it the fifteenth best selling album of the decade.  Wow!  It also tells me it came in four formats - standard and deluxe CD, vinyl and cassette, with the cassette only being available in Indonesia.  Quite bizarre and utterly useless information! 

"Customers also listened to" The Fray, Keane, Plain White T's and The Calling, which is a surprisingly low key group for such a phenomenally successfully album.  Personally, I think "Run" is still my favourite Snow Patrol track, but it was nice to listen to this again and remind myself exactly how much they took the country by storm - I suspect this was quite a few people's favourite around this time and will probably be a nice reminder to pop it on the old sterogram.

10/12/06 - I didn't remember this being so successful
24/12/06 - It's just getting better