The simple things just are sometimes deep

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

11/04/10 : Brother - Boyzone

Our third visit with Boyzone - both of the last ones were from '96 and it's fair to say I wasn't overly impressed with them, but particularly not by the singing.  I'm imagining that either the lads had learned to sing in the intervening years or the engineers had worked out how to use autotune, but I'm still not expecting to like it though...

And no, I don't like it - but all the rough edges have mostly definitely been smoothed away.  Some might suggest to the point of dullness, but I'd say it's more just not very exciting.  It has some decent enough harmonies in places, but I'd struggle to say any of particularly stuck in my mind - with the bizarre exception of the introduction to "Let Your Wall Fall Down" which sounds surprisingly Screamadelica-esque for about 15 seconds and then reverts to the expected ballady smoothness.  All of which seems like an odd thing for me to take away from the album - but we are where we are...

...and where we are this week is #2 in the charts on their fifth week of a 17 week run, having spent three weeks at #1 - which feels to me like a load of people bought this nostalgically.  The rest of the top five were Lady Gaga (her seventh week at the top in her 65th week on the chart), Justin Bieber (it's coming!), Paolo Nutini and Florence & The Machine (I'm looking forward to this) - it's an interesting mix this week.  There are no new entries in the top ten this week - the highest is a Doves best-of (#12) and the next two are a very eclectic pair of dudes - Jonsi (#21) and Rufus Wainwright (#22).

Wikipedia tells me this is their first album in 12 years and was named for Stephen Gately, who died in 2009.  It also tells me that, unlike their previous albums, none of the band members wrote any of the songs - all in all, 28 people were drafted in to write 12 songs so it's a bit of a surprise it sounds as cohesive as it does.  Amazingly, the critics were nice about it - I mean it is an arguably "better" effort than either of their previous offerings I've endured, but it still doesn't feel like something they'd bring themselves to be nice about.  Maybe they thought it wouldn't be fair to Stephen to be mean - the BBC feel like they got it right with “It’s soft about its edges, its lyrical content exclusively syrupy – but that’s fine, as at this stage in their career, pronounced progression was never a likely option".  Funnily enough, it got to #1 in Ireland as well as here but did better in Europe than I was expecting.  And it also, obviously, got to #6 in Taiwan and #28 in South Korea.

"Customers also listened to" A1, Ronan Keating, Stephen Gately and Boyzlife - I'm quite happy avoiding most of them but nothing would ever make me listen to a Boyzlife album.  But I've managed three Boyzone albums without overly suffering - this is quite interesting to compare with the other two because it's a demonstrably "better" album which removes all the bad points of the others, but it also removes all of the points that some might argue were good.

04/04/10 - Please - just make it stop.
18/04/10 - Very average and forgettable