Far away, far away, far away, far away, far away

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

12/12/99 : Steptacular - Steps

I never quite know what I think about Steps - I view them in a harsher light than S Club 7, but I don't have any real reason for that because they were pretty much exactly the same thing.  I'm not expecting to like this, but I've idea whether I'm going to hate it - I think I'll probably just find it bearable but tiresome.  It probably won't surprise you to hear that neither of us ever bought this one, dropping the ownership ratio to 66%.

But I have to say "Tragedy" is a decent enough opener - it's not exactly building upon the fine work done by Bee Gees, but it's different enough to be worth the effort.  I also actively liked "A Deeper Shade Of Blue" - but I was surprised at how much I just zoned the rest of it out.  It was like I was shopping in River Island (people used to leave the house to shop for clothes in 1999) and there was something on with some pleasant enough vocals and a beat but I wasn't supposed to actually listen to it.  I totally didn't see why anyone thought we needed 55 minutes of it, but it was surprisingly unannoying.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on its seventh week of a 57 week run (it so didn't deserve that) having peaked at #1 for four of its first five weeks (ditto!).  The rest of the top five were Shania, George Michael (a new entry), Travis and a Celine Dion best-of and the next highest new entry was Notorious B.I.G. (#70).

Wikipedia has a reasonable amount on the album that I've read several times and haven't found anything of any interest.  Unsurprisingly, there's no section on critical comment but the commercial section tells us it did remarkably well in Belgium getting to #2.  Obviously.  Although I should point out it sold 50k units in Belgium and 1,291,588 in the UK, so I think we're still way cooler than those Belgians - it was the seventh best selling of the album of the year here.

"Customers also listened to" Scooch (there's a Scooch album??!), S Club Juniors, The Allstars and Billie Piper - I think I listened to a Billie album once but I'm pleased to say I've erased it from my mind.  Which, I'm pleased to say, is absolutely going to happen for this album - and really that's the best outcome for everyone for this because I won't be telling people how I hated it.  Which, to be fair, I didn't - which was a most unexpected state of affairs.

05/12/99 - In which I go overboard with praise
19/12/99 - Fine but pointless

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