He was a little bit scared, a little apprehensive - he was just a boy from a local comprehensive

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

18/04/10 : Everybody Wants To Be On TV - Scouting For Girls

Our first visit with Scouting For Girls - I can't say I know a load about them.  They're a slightly trendier Busted, aren't they?

Yeah, that's pretty much where we are - it's all perfectly jaunty but there's not a lot more to it than that.  However, I did learn something which surprised me - they're English!  I've no idea why I thought they were American, but there's no chance of a US band using the word "comprehensive" as they do in the lyrics I've used for this post's title.  And, unfortunately, that's the only song I remember from the entire album.  It is quite a US looking album cover though, isn't it?  (or is just me?)

We're at #2 with a new entry in the charts this week on their start of a 28 week run - it's not quite the 78 week run their eponymous debut from '07 managed.  The rest of the top five were Plan B (another new entry), Lady Gaga, MGMT (another new entry) and Justin Bieber (I can't wait to listen to that one soon!) and we have one more new entry in the top ten with Joshua Radin's Simple Times (#9) which is a very decent album indeed.  

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album but does give us the following "fascinating" fact - "Otis Spooge was dropped from the line up on account of his poor whistling on the previous album".  Which feels like an in-joke, but it's one I'm definitely not in on.  The only other content is a list of all the singles from the album - "This Ain't a Love Song" got to #1, but the highest any of the others got was #17 and two of them didn't even make the top 40.  Wikipedia tells us the critics gave it mixed reviews, but the reviews they list seem pretty consistent to me with everyone hating it - NME giving it an amusing 0/10.  The UK public didn't care though and it also charted in Ireland and, somewhat unexpectedly, Germany.

"Customers also listened to" The Feeling, McBusted, The Ordinary Boys and Orson (they're the American ones!) - none of them being exactly up my street.  And, it seems, we can say the same for Scouting For Girls with "She's So Lovely" still the one track of theirs I recognise - and it's not on this album.

11/04/10 - If you like it, then I guess you like it
25/04/10 - Much better than I as expecting

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more