Sometimes exchanges can be intensive

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

25/04/99 : Rides - Reef

I obviously like "Place Your Hands" (because everyone does, don't they?) but I can't say my expectations are sky-high for this - I'll be happy enough if they can manage a load of tracks that aren't quite as good as that.  And no, I never owned it (16/36)

Yeah, that's pretty much where we are.  There's a definite Primal Scream rocky phase feel to it - it's all absolutely harmless but not exactly great and incredibly nondescript at first listen.  And at 53 minutes is way too long - if you like "Place Your Hands" you probably won't hate this, but that's as far as you're likely to get, I'm afraid.  I'm also very unsure what they were trying to say with the album cover.

This week we're at #3 with a new entry on the start of a ten week run and the rest of the top five were ABBA, Catatonia, The Corrs and Fatboy Slim - quite a nice varied top five and we have two more new entries in the top ten with The Cranberries (#7 with Bury The Hatchet - I've never listened to this one) and Tom Waits (#9).

Wikipedia has very little on the album, but I think The Guardian nails it with "a characteristic mixture of bluesy riffs and shrieking, with passages of quasi-metal played off against nearly-ballads with acoustic guitars for added 'sensitivity'" - which is obviously what I was trying to say.  Commercially, the album did best over here, but also scraped into the top forty in Australia and New Zealand.

"Customers also listened to" Terrorvision, Ocean Colour Scene, The Bluetones (they pop up a lot in this section) and The Seahorses - it's odd because The Seahorses definitely aren't a million miles away but I think their album is just a million times better.  I haven't had a lot to say about Reef - I think the main reason for that is there's not a lot there to say anything about.

18/04/99 - Better than I was expecting
02/05/99 - A nice little album, but...