Standing on the verge of the edge of the ledge

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

28/02/99 : No Exit - Blondie

I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not going to like this - like Cher a couple of days ago, I feel it will have the one decent single on it and that will be it, but let's see shall we?  And no, I've never owned it (20/44) - and somewhat bizarrely it appears that Amazon Music doesn't own it either, so I had to listen to it on YouTube.

Unlike Cher, they make the foolish error of not opening the album with the good track with the one they went for sounding like a Madness track sung by Lene Lovich - by the way, this is not a good thing.  The good track ("Maria") doesn't turn up until track three and I was somewhat surprised at how good it isn't - it's remarkably average and Debbie's voice is well dodgy.  Also, unlike Cher, the title track is particularly rubbish - it's Debbie doing a dreadful rap (a la Atomic) along with Coolio over Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor and Grieg's In The Hall Of The Mountain King.  And the sad thing is that I'm not making this up.  The rest of the album is mostly bearable (but very average and weirdly inconsistent in genre) - providing you ignore Debbie's "singing" which is very poor indeed.  Which, of course, you can't - so the whole thing just sounds shit, I'm afraid.  And then it ends on "Dig Up The Conjo" which is just really, really poor - I'm sorry but I'm mystified by the whole thing...

We're at #8 in the chart this week on their second week of a nineteen week run, having debuted at #3.  The top five this week are The Corrs, Lauryn Hill, Robbie Williams and Manic Street Preachers and Fatboy Slim and the highest new entry are The Barenaked Ladies, all the way down at #25.

I'm actually going to take a bit of time out here to mention The Cardigan's Gran Turismo which slid into the top ten this week (at #10) on its 19th week on the chart (on a 49 week run) - it spent 11 of the next 12 weeks somewhere between #8 and #13 and I've been willing it to get the chance of a write-up, but it's just been unlucky.  So I've given it a re-listen anyway and will just say it's a little gem of an album which still sounds really fresh - they were criminally under-rated.

Back to Blondie's abomination, Wikipedia has a few words on the album, but remarkably little content - it was their first album in 17 years, "Out In The Streets" is a Shangri-Las cover which they first recorded in '75, the album title comes from a Sartre play and it isn't available anywhere on streaming, but no-one seems to know quite why.  There's no comment on the critical reception, but apparently our old mate Robert Christgau rated it A-.  What?!?  It did well enough across Europe, mostly being top thirty-ish except for #2 in Greece and #6 in Portugal and it got to #18 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" - well, we'll never know will we?  Personally, I think people should listen to anything other than this - it almost makes me want to forgive Vengaboys for their bloody awful racket because at least they knew they wanted to annoy me, whereas I can't help but feel Blondie expect me to like this.  Well, for the avoidance of doubt - I don't.

07/03/99 - Another enjoyable revisit
21/02/99 - Again, surprisingly enjoyable