What's that coming over the hill?

Continuing my trip back through the 2006 album charts.

25/06/06 : Not Accepted Anywhere - The Automatic

"Monster" is an interesting track - it's incredibly catchy but also quite annoying at the same time.  I'm expecting the rest of this album to either be the same (which will probably just be a bit too much) or just a bit rubbish.  So let's so what we've got, shall we?

The opening track is very Monsteresque.  Oh, and the second one.  Well, and the third and fourth ones.  The fifth one isn't though - but only because it is "Monster".  But don't worry, the next one gets us back on track - I think you get the general idea.

However, for some unclear reason it never got too much for me.  They know what they're good at and that's what they do - and, anyway, it's not aimed at me, so I'm sure they won't care in the slightest what I think about it.  There's nothing on there quite as catchy as "Monster" but it barrels along nicely enough and doesn't outstay its welcome.  Will I ever listen to it again?  Of course not, but there have been far worse albums this year.

This week, we're at #3 with a new entry starting a 16 week run - and it even came back for another seven week run in the new year.  The rest of the top five were Keane, Fatboy Slim (a new entry), The Kooks and Sandi Thom and the next highest new entry was Dannii Minogue's best of (#16) - I bet that's a short album.  MEOW!

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album - most of which is remarkably content-free, bizarrely interspersed with incredibly detailed info eg "the band used 3 different synthesisers during the recording of the album - an Alesis Micron, Roland Juno-106 and an Alesis Andromeda".   Who cares?!?  Bizarrely, the album was completely re-mixed for the US market and they were called The Automatic Automatic over there.  The critics were much kinder to the album than I was expecting - maybe like me they were surprised at how bearable it was.  Commercially, it only really did anything over here - despite them spending a year touring the US.

"Customers also listened to" Kaiser Chiefs, Electric Six and Feeder - I'm not entirely sure Feeder will be pleased to be lumped in with that lot.  But the rest of them certainly have the quality that they make bearable (and, at times, decent) music without taking themselves overly seriously - and this album definitely fits into that category.  Whilst being considerably more tolerable than expected.

18/06/06 - Perfectly fine, but nothing more than that
02/07/06 - Not a great album

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