A reason to believe that there's a heaven above

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

02/09/90 : Graffiti Bridge - Prince

Before I started this exercise, I'd never listened to a Prince album - he's done OK so far, but given I've had Dirty Mind, Sign O' The Times and Purple Rain I suspect that's the cream of the crop and there are some duds out there.  Let's just hope this isn't one of them (and no, we've never owned it - 5/18).

Definitely not a dud - there's some pretty funky sounds on here.  But, when you compare it's lyrical content with his top albums - there's just nothing there.  I can't claim to be an expert on his canon, but when you compare the fantastic storytelling on eg "Sign O' The Times" with this, it's just like he's given up trying - "chuck some woos and ahhs in there and everything will be fine".  There's a decent amount of musical variety across this album though - I particularly liked "Melody Cool" but I'd have to say it was all perfectly listenable, if somewhat lacking lyrically.

We're at #3 in the charts this week on his second week of an eight week run, having debuted at #1 - which is a pretty fast fall from grace for those days.  The rest of the top five were The Three Tenors, Elton John, Michael Bolton and Jon Bon Jovi and we have one new entry in the top ten which is Prefab Sprout's Jordan: The Comeback (#7), which is a really good album if you've not heard it.

Wikipedia has volume over content, although it does sound suspiciously like the album was pieced together from bits and pieces he'd recorded over the previous five years because he needed a soundtrack for the film (which did not do well).  The critics liked the album though ("a groovable feast" apparently) although The New York Times agreed with me that "verbally, he's no deep thinker; when he's not singing about sex, his messages tend to be benevolent and banal".  It did well commercially though getting to the top ten in most countries and there are a couple of famous names hidden away in the personnel listing - George Clinton and Mavis Staples.

"Customers also listened to" Sheila E, The Time, Bobby Brown and Janet Jackson - all sounds not a million miles away from His Royal Purpleness.  But whilst previous Prince albums had been better than expected, this manages to be somewhat of a disappointment - it's fine, but it feels like the sort of thing he could knock off in about five minutes.

26/08/90 - Earnestly dull
09/09/90 - Nicely of its time

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