Induce a case of mild madness

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

23/05/10 : The Dance - Faithless

This is our first visit with Faithless, which is a slight surprise since they've had seven top ten (including three #1) albums over the years - but they've always fallen in years which we have yet to visit.  I'm a big fan of their best work but I suspect there's an awful lot of stuff which doesn't count as their best work - and I fear I might be about to visit some.  They were also, to my surprise, incredibly dull live when I caught them at Glasto around this time - so I'm approaching it with some degree of trepidation.

Well - it's OK in places.  It starts pretty well with "Not Going Home" and "Feel Me", takes a weird dub detour on "Crazy Bal'heads" and then reverts to a mostly fine but somewhat unimpressive level, although I did also like "Flyin Hi".  My major criticism that can be levelled across the whole album is that they don't know when to end a track - all but one are over five minutes long and most of them are struggling big time towards the end.  I also say that Dido's input is not exactly anything to write home about.

We're at #2 with a new entry this week on the start of a twelve week run, which is somewhat more than I was expecting.  Somewhat bizarrely it was kept off the top by The Rolling Stones with what appears to legally be a new entry, despite most of it first seeing the light of day in 1972 - but there are apparently significant changes in this version (which I'm sure I wouldn't notice).  The rest of the top five are Plan B, Baseballs (another new entry - who I can tell you nothing about) and Lady Gaga, with another new entry at #7 for LCD Soundsystem.

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album - the band tell us "this is our best work ever and we're excited about it" and most of the critics tell us "sorry guys, it ain't and we're not".  It did OK across Europe though and sold half a million copies globally, which seems like a better reception than I would have expected.

It's a decent enough effort, but there's absolutely nothing to drag you away from their best stuff - if you're not aware of them then I'd point you at either Sunday 8pm or Outrospective, which are their second and third albums.  I believe Reverance, their debut album, is also supposed to be good but I have yet to check it out - and I would certainly go there rather than revisiting this.

16/05/10 - A tolerable oddity
30/05/10 - I didn't mind this at all

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