Well I'm accustomed to a smooth ride

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

09/12/90 : The Rhythm Of The Saints - Paul Simon 

As I recall it, there were two ways of looking at this - either Paul used this album to shine the spotlight on the incredible rhythms of South America or he was desperate to recreate the commercial gold of Graceland to line his pockets further.  However charitable your view, I remember I bought it (3/4) and listened to once or twice but no more than that - I remember it being perfectly fine, but no more than that.

Yeah - it is perfectly fine and does indeed feature some incredible rhythms, but I actually feel it suffers from a bit of a lack of Paul Simon-ness on it.  His voice is often quite low in the mix (particularly in comparison with the percussion) but most of all, the songs lack his brand of simple but resonant story telling which was so apparent on Graceland and a lot of the stuff he did with Art.  I did like "The Obvious Child" (the opening track and lead single), "Further To Fly" and "Born At The Right Time" (another single) but the rest of them are just a bit too busy and not sing-along enough to make them memorable, I'm afraid.  The version of the album I listened to included a guitar and voice only version of "Born At The Right Time" and I'm afraid its simplicity was a breath of fresh air in comparison.

We're at #9 in the charts this week on his eighth week of a 22 week run, having spent the first two weeks at #1 - it managed six more weeks in the chart in '91, but hasn't been seen since.  The top five this week are Madonna, Elton John, Phil Collins, The Three Tenors and Jimmy Somerville - we have yet to have a studio album in the top five this year.  We do at least have a couple of reasonably high new entries in the chart this week, but I wouldn't get too excited - it's Vanilla Ice (#11) and NKOTB's Xmas album (#13).  Both of which I'm pleased so say I've avoided.

Wikipedia has very little on the album - it was very much made along the same lines as Graceland and the critics and public liked it (#4 in the US, 4 million sales globally) although the singles didn't do so well.  One thing I didn't know was that he did a free concert in Central Park of the album in front of 500,000 people - that must have been quite some event.

"Customers also listened to" Simon & Garfunkel (no idea who they are), Randy Newman, Peter Gabriel and Joni Mitchell - some fine songwriters there!  And while this album was perfectly fine, it just didn't bear the hallmarks of a Paul Simon classic for me, I'm afraid - the rhythms just overrode everything else.

02/12/90 - Fine, if not great
16/12/90 - Bang average

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