Who's that girl in the spotlight ?

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

28/11/10 : Outta This World - JLS

We're on a run of nice guys, aren't we?  I vaguely recall one or two of their singles but I've certainly never attempted a whole album - I'm expecting it to be perfectly pleasant but not exactly rocking.

Well, the opening track "The Club Is Alive" is almost rocking and not bad at all, but after that it's very much not rocking - it's surprisingly bland in a lot of places (although maybe not all the surprising when I really think about it).  It's not hateful, but I'm really struggling to think of anything else to say about it - I guess it's fine if you want something inoffensive for the kids to bop along to, but I struggle to imagine anyone actually choosing to listen to it.

We're at #2 in the charts this week with a new entry at the start of a 21 week run and it managed another ten weeks throughout '11, which is a decent enough effort - but certainly a step down from the 69 weeks their chart-topping debut managed.  The rest of the top five this week are Take That, Westlife (a new entry, so JLS have instantly gone up in my estimation having saved me from that), Susan Boyle (it's coming...) and Rihanna.  And the next new entries are the obvious pairing of Russell Watson (#13) and My Chemical Romance (#14) - closely followed by what many people regard as Kanye's masterpiece (#16) which interestingly never got any higher than that (this was back in the days when he was merely annoying).

Wikipedia has very little on the album - Oritsé tells us how they took risks on the album and the critics tell us they very much didn't.  "The boy band remains a terminally dull proposition for anyone outside the teen-girl demographic" is my favourite quote and by no means the worst, although some people were nice about it.  It did pretty well both here and in Ireland and did nothing anywhere else - but it was #18 in the year-end chart, which is surprisingly decent for an album released at the end of November.

"Customers also listened to" Union J, Lawson, The Wanted and Rak-su - the fans aren't wandering too far from the path there.  There's nothing horrible about this, but it really doesn't feel like they're trying very hard and it very much struggled to hold my attention - well, let's be honest, it failed miserably.

21/11/10 - A bizarrely slow album
05/12/10 - Not his best work

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