A new religion that'll bring ya to your knees

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

13/05/90 : Alannah Myles : Alannah Myles

I don't think I can fault "Black Velvet" as a track, but I'd be hard pushed to name anything else she did - I'm expecting this to be listenable but not exactly top drawer.  And no, we never owned it - 7/34.

Yup - listenable but not exactly top drawer is a fair enough comment, with the notable exception of "Black Velvet" which was a lot better than I remembered.  On the rest of it, she has a better voice than I was expecting but it doesn't feel like anyone spent any more than about five minutes writing the rest of the songs - they'd be fun enough if she was belting them out live in a dive bar somewhere but, on first listen at least, it didn't really do anything for me.

We're at #6 on her fourth week of a 21 week run, with it having peaked at #3 in its debut week - all of which must be entirely down to "Black Velvet".  The top five this week were The Carpenters best-of, Phil Collins, UB40, Paula Abdul and Nigel Kennedy's Four Seasons (I ignored this - I'm not sure I should have, but all I'd have said was "this is nice music") and the highest new entry was Bruce Dickinson (#14).

Wikipedia has three sentences on the album - it came out, it was successful (particularly in mountainous countries, with it getting to #1 in Canada, Switzerland, Norway and Finland and #2 in Sweden and Austria) and Deborah Samuel took the cover photo.  And the fascinating fact from her entry is that she was born Allanah Byles but decided to drastically change her name to the MUCH more interesting Allanah Myles in order to succeed in the music business - who knows what would have happened otherwise?

"Customers also listened to" Cher, Corey Hart, Kim Carnes and Cutting Crew - there's an awful of lot of c/k sounds in that lot, but not a lot else obviously in common.  The next one on the list was Pat Benatar which seems a much closer connection to me - but Pat seems a lot more fun, with Alannah just taking herself a bit too seriously for me.  But "Black Velvet" is still a fine track -although it stands alone on the album as such.

06/05/90 - Comfortably failed to meet my low expectations
20/05/90 - Astonishingly successful

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