Please release me, let me go - for I don't love you any more.

Continuing my trip back through the 1968 album charts.

11/02/68 : Release Me - Engelbert Humperdinck

Well, if I had to pick an artist that I'd bump into three times in '68, I don't think it would have been Engelbert - even if I re-did albums that I'd met before, I think I'd only have hit The Beatles and The Stones twice.  But here we are, with some not exactly high expectations, but also not expecting to hate it.

And yeah, it's not hateable - it doesn't hurt that it opens with the title track, which is 100% cheese but there's no doubting it's quality cheese.  And I thought the rest of the album felt a bit stronger than our previous visits - I'm sure that most of them are covers, but they're not as obviously covers as we've previously seen and there's slightly more of a guitar/keyboard sound on this album than 100% strings.  It's quite the album cover as well - the man is rocking some sideburns there!

We're at #24 in the charts this week on his 40th week of a 58 week run (of course he did) with it having peaked at #6 in its 17th and 19th weeks.  The top five this week were The Four Tops best-of, The Supremes best-of, TSOM, Sgt Pepper and The Monkees, the highest new entry was Frankie McBride (#29 - never heard of him!) and there are no new women in the charts.

Wikipedia doesn't have anything on the album, so I'll just have to give you some facts on the title track - it was written in '49 by Eddie Miller and Robert Yount and has since been recorded by just about everyone!  Engelbert's version has been the most successful though, getting to #1 for six weeks, keeping The Beatles' "Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever" off the top in the process and it stayed in the charts for 56 weeks.  It also got to #4 in the US - no-one was safe!  And a nice bit of trivia for you - the session guitarists used on the track were Big Jim Sullivan (who played with just about everyone in the 60s and 70s) and an unknown-at-the-time Jimmy Page.

"Customers also listened to" OC Smith, Wayne Newton, Brian Hyland and Tom Jones - who apparently hated Engelbert with a passion for many years.  I can't say I'm his biggest fan, but I couldn't be bothered to work up the energy to hate him - this album ain't great but if I had to listen to one of his albums again, it's in with a shout.

04/02/68 - Yeah, I liked this
18/02/68 - Who was buying this?

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