It's empty in the valley of your heart

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

20/06/10 : Sigh No More - Mumford And Sons

Well - this is an odd week because of all the albums we get to ignore - a Glee monstrosity (although to be fair, they do do some tracks well - but a whole album of it is just too much), a Glenn Miller best-of, The RAF Squadronaires (no idea what they were doing so high in the chart) and a Billy Joel best-of.  How odd that they all popped up this week, leaving us with Mr Mumford and his sons - an album I know and tolerate in places, but find a bit of a chore to handle in one lump.  But here we go anyway...

Yeah, it was a bit of a chore.  A not entirely unpleasant chore, but just one I'd rather have not done.  "The Cave" is the one I like (but can never remember what it's called because the lyrics have nothing to do with caves) and "Roll Away Your Stone" is also good - the rest of them are all fine enough, but put them all together and it just gets a bit too much.  And there's really too much banjo on there - mostly because ANY banjo is too much banjo (not you, Diversity - you're forgiven).  I also didn't need the 104 minutes of the deluxe version - the 48 minute standard edition would have been much more tolerable.

We're all the way down at #10 in the charts this week on its 37 week of a - wait for it - 137 week run in the chart.  It then took a month off and came back for another 66 weeks - it's managed 218 weeks all told, last being seen in 2016.  And it peaked at #2 in its 72nd week, which is quite the time taken to get there.  The top five this week were Oasis (a new entry), the Glee monstrosity (another new entry), Michael Bublé, Glenn Miller and The RAF Squadronaires - what a peculiar selection, and there were no more new entries in the top ten, with the next highest being Crowded House (#11).

Wikipedia has the expectedly small amount for a fantastically successful album because it wasn't by an American artist, although I did learn that "the album's title is taken from a line in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing".  The critical reception section is somewhat short ("generally favourable reviews") but the public really didn't care - it's sold five million copes globally and was the second debut to sell more than a million digital copies (after Lady Gaga).  It did a lot better in the US than most UK albums - peaking at #2 and it was #8 in '11 and #29 in '12 year-end charts (and it was #10 in the UK '10 year-end).

"Customers also listened to" Of Monsters And Men (who I didn't mind at all when I listened to them), Florence + The Machine, The Lumineers and Kings Of Leon - well, I didn't expect things to end there.  But whilst I'm not a massive Mumford fan, but it's all perfectly listenable - I am extremely perplexed by its popularity though.

13/06/10 - I think I quite liked this
27/06/10 - Really very bad indeed

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