You know this boogie is for real

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

25/07/99 : Synkronized - Jamiroquai

I think I bought a Jamiroquai album once (but not this one - 8/23), listened to it a few times, deemed it to be "perfectly fine" and never listened to it again.  And my expectations for this are very much in line with that.

Yup - it's "perfectly fine", if a little repetitive.  It opens with "Canned Heat" which is one of their better tracks and, somewhat surprisingly, closes with "Going Underground" (which seems like a strange place for it) but nothing particularly stands out on the journey in between.  Except for the didgeridoo, but not for the right reasons, unfortunately.  It's all well done, but not spectacularly so.

We're at #8 in the charts this week on their sixth week of a 35 week run, with it having debuted at #1 - all of which feels very generous of the record buying public at the time.  The top five this week were Boyzone (still?), Ricky Martin, Shania, Whitney and Abba Gold with the highest new entry being Goo Goo Dolls all the way down at #47.  I'm also going to mention the Dean Martin best of at the surprisingly high #7 in the charts on a 35 week run - he always makes me think of Fran's dad who used to listen to him ALL the time (and had a slightly offputting trick when offering you a drink at 10am - "Coffee?  Tea?  Whisky?").

Back to Jamiroquai, Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album but a lot of it is a very detailed section on how well the album did in each country - "In Belgium, it ranked 4 in the Ultratop Flanders chart and number 6 in the Wallonia chart. In their year end charts, the album ranked at 42 and 36 respectively".  Seriously, who cares?  The critics generally liked it, although our old friend Robert Christgau thought it was "a bad record of some general import" - whatever that means.  Commercially, it did very well in Europe (#1 in Germany, #2 in France) and even managed to get to #28 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" The Brand New Heavies, Jools Holland, Mokoko and some film soundtracks, which seems like a peculiar selection indeed.  I didn't mind this album but I do feel that, if you have a preference for such things, the Jamiroquai best-of is all you really need in your life and there's nothing here to dissuade me from such a notion.

18/07/99 - Some very fine tracks indeed
01/08/99 - I wasn't expecting to like 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