Everything will work out in the end

Continuing my trip back through the 2006 album charts.

02/04/06 : This New Day - Embrace

A special week this one what with it marking the arrival of our first born - so it's fair to say that the music charts weren't uppermost on our minds at the time, so I shall make sure to give it due consideration now.  It's not a cool thing to admit but I don't mind this kind of thing at all ("music for bedwetters" was how Alan McGee famously referred to it).  I owned The Good Will Out, their debut album, but am not aware I ever listened to anything after that - and I was somewhat surprised to learn this was four albums and eight years later, but I was still looking forward to it.

And yeah, I enjoyed it although it was a bit rockier in places than I was expecting.  Not "rock" obviously, but it did at least speed up from time to time.  It's all very Coldplay, so if you don't go for that kind of thing then steer well clear - but at least we don't have Chris Martin's voice here, so that's a bonus for me.  No one track leapt out at me, but it was all perfectly serviceable and the time passed pleasantly enough (what more praise could I give it?).  And what a nice title it is for a week featuring an important new beginning!

We're at a somewhat surprising #1 with a new entry this week, starting a thirteen week run - I say surprising but actually it was their third (and last) #1 album.  The rest of the top five were Massive Attack (another new entry), Journey South (I don't remember them at all), Andy Abraham (I remember him because he played a works do once) and Corinne Bailey Rae - no previous visits this week, although that's only because I've ignored Massive Attack's best-of.  And we have one more new entry in the top ten - Yeah Yeah Yeahs (#7).

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album but it does manage to squeeze a couple of interesting facts in there - on the strength of this album, they were given the England World Cup song of this year and you can have ten whole points if you can remember what it was called (it was so memorable that I read it ten seconds ago and I've already forgotten it).  Also, this was the first album to top the UK Albums Download chart - do you remember when we used to pay more for digital versions and we STILL didn't own them?  The critical reception was "mixed or average" reviews - it's exactly the sort of thing critics like to be mean about, but no-one who likes it is going to care.  It didn't exactly set the rest of the world alight, but it did well enough here obviously.

Because it's a special week, I'm going to include a new section where I take a sneak peak at the UK #1 single - yes, it's another appropriate title with Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy"!  A fine track which hasn't aged at all across the years and feels like it's been nicely inspirational without being unduly copied.  And now I fine myself with a nearly 17 year old - "Does that make me crazy? Possibly".

Back to Embrace, "customers also listened to" Longview (who I also don't mind), Travis, Starsailor and The Seahorses (also very under-rated) - all very much in the same ballpark.  I didn't mind this album at all, but I'd struggle to say it had a huge amount of content to drag me back to it - it's been nice to be reminded of that momentous week in our lives though.  

And you get ten points if you remembered their World Cup song was "World At Your Feet".

26/03/06 - A musical peculiarity
09/04/06 - Taken on the music alone, a pretty decent album