L.A. is a great big freeway

Continuing my trip back through the 1968 album charts.

30/06/68 : Dionne Warwick In Valley Of The Dolls - Dionne Warwick

Ooooh - the very week of my birth!  I already know The Small Faces were #1 which I consider to be a cool enough choice considering some of the possible alternatives, but I'm not entirely sure what Dionne's going to give me here.  It's definitely not going to be like our previous visit with her in 1983 - I'm expecting some pleasant enough warbling, but maybe a bit light.

I think my expectations were pretty much met - "Do You Know The Way To San José" is the obvious highlight, the rest of it is a bit female Andy Williams-ish - this is borne out by her also doing "Up Up And Away" (yet another song we've seen more than once this year).  Her voice is obviously stronger than Andy's but the production is quite odd in that it feels as though they don't want to show it off too much - it all feels a bit intentionally flat to me.

We're at #10 in the charts this week on her tenth run of a thirteen week run, with it never getting any higher than this (although it spent three weeks there).  The top five this week are The Small Faces, Otis, Bob, Andy and TSOM, the highest new entry was TCWOAB (#28) and we have a new woman named on an album - Esther Ofarim (who I've never heard of but we'll be meeting her at some point soon enough) which takes the running totals for the year to 8 named and 7 featured.

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album, but there are some nuggets in there - the title track was indeed the theme from Valley Of The Dolls (and it got to #2), but it doesn't appear on the soundtrack album because they'd only sorted out a licence for it to appear in the film.  All of which sounds a bit nuts!  I also learned that Dionne didn't initially like "Do You Know The Way To San José" and "You're My World" was a #1 hit for Cilla Black (we're gonna bump into her at some point in the 60s and I'm quite looking forward to it).  It also, quite bizarrely, in the "Personnel" section lists Dionne eighth out of nine people involved in the album - someone really isn't keen on bigging up her role on the album.

"Customers also listened to" The 5th Dimension (no idea!), Burt Bacharach, Petula Clark and Jack Jones - wow, most of these guys are still alive!  Burt died earlier this year (aged 95) and one of The  5th Dimension died in 2001, but all the rest are still with us - Petula is 90 (and has been married to her husband for 62 years) and everyone else is in their 80s!  Dionne is a sprightly 82 and looking pretty good on it but I'm afraid this ain't the best album ever - it feels like it has way more potential than it delivers, which is a rarity so I feel annoyed for her.  But she has the privilege of having my birth week album, so that's gotta count for something right?

23/06/68 - Certainly, errr, something
07/07/68 - An intriguing album

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