I bring her coffee in the morning - she brings me inner peace

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

26/05/23 : Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent - Lewis Capaldi 

I liked our last visit with Lewis (although I can't claim that I have ever bothered going back there) and I'd be very surprised if this was massively different...

...and I can certainly keep my surprised face in the locker for another day.  It's all well done stuff - possibly a little obsessed with love found and love lost, but he's got a good voice and he's got a nice line in lyrics ("Pointless" in particular is just lovely).  I don't really think there's a lot more to say about it - if you like Lewis, then you'll like this.

And we're at #1 with a new entry this week - I expect it will be hanging about for a bit (and his previous album is at #17 on a 210 week run).  The rest of the top five this week are Ed, Sleep Token (a new entry), Def Leppard and The Royal Philharmonic (another new entry - and a strange combination) and Harry Styles and we have one more new entry in the top ten with Ghost (#8).  How peculiar that two of the new entries these week conceal their identity on stage with masks - is it International Mask Week or something?

Wikipedia tells us that Lewis explains that he wasn't looking to reinvent himself with this album and the critics were very much agreed that he hasn't - some considered this to be a good thing, others not so much.  The public were perfectly happy with the state of affairs though, with this outselling the rest of the top ten put together over here and it also hit #1 in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and The Netherlands.

"Customers also listened to" Dean Lewis (who I know nothing about), Lizzy McAlpine, Niall Horan and Mimi Webb (all of whom have a tendency to be somewhat overwrought).  And Lewis is very overwrought on this - I didn't mind it but it felt like a bit of a step back from his previous album for me (or at least very much not a step forward).

19/05/23 - Much more enjoyable than expected
02/06/23 - Admirable, if not entirely lovable

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