Who can deny the joy it brings when you've found that special thing

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

05/12/99 : Westlife - Westlife


Unlike Steps, I know exactly what I think of Westlife - this is my third visit with the lads and last time my comment was "I'd rather poke my eyes out than listen to this again".  And I have no reason to imagine this one is going to be any better.  And no, it's not one either of us owned dropping the ownership ratio to 50% (but I bet the mother-in-law has a copy somewhere) - 2/4.

Well, that was a surprise - it didn't make me want to poke my eyes out.  Maybe I was just in a good mood or just possibly it actually was just better.  I mean, don't misunderstand me, I didn't LIKE it but it wasn't terrible - and I have to admit that "Flying Without Wings" and "More Than Words" are bearable.  And there's no denying they can at least sing - particularly when comparing this with Boyzone's debut album.  I'm afraid "Seasons In The Sun" does overdo things for me with the Oirish tin whistle and I've no idea why anyone though we needed 65 minutes of it.  SIXTY-FIVE!!  Just no.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on its fifth week of a 73 week run, peaking at #2 in its debut week and it managed another nine weeks over three more runs, with it last being seen in '03.  The rest of the top five were Shania, Steps, a Celine Dion best-of and Travis and the highest new entry was The Fun Lovin' Criminals (#70 - I once saw them live in St Albans).

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album - the main thing I took away was that it spawned five #1 singles, but didn't reach the top itself.  Here anyway - it did somehow make it to #1 in Ireland (who could have guessed that?), Norway (slightly less obvious) and, somewhat bizarrely Indonesia and The Philippines.  In the last two countries, it is the best selling international album EVER, with it having sold over a million copies in Indonesia - weird, huh?  It may not have made the top here, but it hasn't exactly done shabbily - it's sold over 1.5 million copies and was #8 in the year-end chart in this year and still #32 in '00.

"Customers also listened to" Boyzone, A1 and 911 - oooh, my favourites!  But, I have to admit that this album was "better" than I was expecting - I wouldn't choose to listen to it again, but I wouldn't leave the room screaming if it was put on (by someone who obviously hated me).

28/11/99 - A fine album that I previously missed
12/12/99 - A surprisingly unannoying 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