Here's my heart, what's left of it

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

09/05/10 : Songs From The Tainted Cherry Tree - Diana Vickers

I can tell you nothing about Ms Vickers - the name rings a vague bell, but that's all I've got.  Going on statistics, I'm guessing we've either got something like Pixie Lott or Diana Krall - but I'm going in to this completely blind.

Well, it's more like Pixie than Diana, but she's more going for a "girly" (and I don't like the word, but it feels closest here) Snow Patrol sound - it works OK I guess but wasn't particularly memorable on first listen.  "The Boy Who Murdered Love" had a catchy enough chorus and it was nice to hear the cover of The Sugacubes "Hit", although I can't say I loved her version.  None of it's horrible but it's hard to know who it's aimed at.  Wikipedia reminds me she was an X Factor contestant and I guess their audience is exactly the target - people who like nice enough songs which are sung well enough but don't overly care beyond that (and yes, I'm probably being a bit catty there).  I'm not a massive fan of the album cover either.

We're at #1 with a new entry this week at the start of a seven week run - which was pretty much what I expected.  What I didn't expect was for it to take a couple of weeks off and come back for another nine weeks!  What were people thinking?!?  The rest of the top five were Plan B, AC/DC (I wasn't expecting that - but we will find out more about it on another entry), Usher (unfortunately, we'll also find out more about this) and Lady Gaga and we have one more new entry in the top ten at #8 with Lady Antebellum (now known as Lady A).  And I'm also going to mention the next new entry at #23 which is The Magic Of Mantovani - who was born in 1905 and died in 1980, so quite who was buying this is very unclear.

Wikipedia has more on the album than I was expecting, but most of it is either X Factor background or listing the people involved in the album - there are a lot of them!  The people I recognised were Nerina Pallot, Ellie Goulding, Dev Hynes (Lightspeed Champion), Cathy Dennis, Eg White and Gary Lightbody, but that's just scratching the surface.  The critics were mixed - but surprisingly they either loved it or just thought it was a bit too commercial.  It was only too commercial over here and in Ireland though, although it did make #15 in the South Korean International chart - which just sounds like a bizarre thing to a) exist and b) happen.  Diana's Wikipedia entry is quite an interesting one - she's tried a lot of stuff in the intervening years and seems to have found herself a niche performing in musicals at the minute.

"Customers also listened to" Pixie Lott, Cheryl, The Saturdays and Girls Aloud - I think that gives you a good idea where we are here.  But despite all the talk of her being overly commercial, I didn't get the impression she was quite as try-hard as some of that bunch - I more thought she was doing the sort of thing she wanted to do, but I just wasn't so sure who would be interested in it.

02/05/10 - Why do people like this?
16/05/10 - A tolerable oddity

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