Close the door behind you, leave your key

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

08/08/99 : My Love Is Your Love - Whitney Houston

Our second visit with Whitney and last time I found it to be a variable affair - I'm expecting this to be more consistent, but unfortunately consistently poorer in quality.  But we shall see - either way, it's certainly not one we've ever owned (8/21)...

I actually knew the opener "It's Not Right But It's Okay" but I'd completely forgotten it was Whitney - it's pretty identikit R&B, albeit well done identikitness.  The same also applies to the title track, although it's reggae-ish beat makes it slightly less identikit than expected.  I didn't know any of the rest of it, but it's all well done if not exactly exceptional - she definitely had a lovely voice and it's shown off here well.  It's not really my thing, but perfectly harmless and undoubtedly better than I was expecting.

We're at #6 in the charts this week on her 38th week of a 70 week run, with it having peaked at #4 in her 35th and 36th weeks, which is a slow ride up and a slow ride down (and was actually considerably more successful than her previous album, I'm Your Baby Tonight).  The top five this week were Boyzone, Ricky Martin, Shania, an Elvis Costello best-of (a new entry which features some fine tracks) and Travis and the next highest new entry is Alison Krauss all the way down at #77.

Wikipedia has a massive amount on the album (476 milliPeppers) but surprisingly little content with the critics liking it (Rolling Stone suggested her marital woes contributed to its effectiveness, which feels like a bit of a stretch to me) and it doing phenomenally well commercially.  Surprisingly, it only got to #13 in the US but it seems like a big part of the reason for that was that it seemed like releasing an album for Thanksgiving was a big thing back then with Garth Brooks, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Jewel, Method Man, The Offspring and Seal all releasing albums in the same week - which provides more than the usual level of competition.  It still managed to sell over ten million copies globally though - which is a pretty decent effort, I guess.

"Customers also listened to" Deborah Cox (who sounds like she should work in HR rather than be a recording artist), Brandy (a much less HR-kinda sounding name), Jennifer Hudson and Janet Jackson - that's a whole lot of warbling going on there.  As I said, I found this better than I was expecting but it's really not my thing.

01/08/99 - I wasn't expecting to like this
15/08/99 - A massively successful album