What in the world can make a brown-eyed girl turn blue?

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

09/09/90 : Look Sharp! - Roxette

Roxette existed in a strange limbo between cool and uncool - they were far too popular (for a bit) to be truly cool, but they also didn't overly appear to care about being popular, so you couldn't really hate them.  And "It Must Have Been Love" really fitted in with the overall Pretty Woman feel so well that you kinda admired them a bit, even if you didn't like them.  I've never heard (or owned - 5/17) any of their albums so I'm quite intrigued as to what this is like.

I knew the opening pair of tracks ("The Look" and "Dressed For Success") and the closing track ("Listen To Your Heart") - I can see they won't be everyone's cup of tea but I don't mind them.  And the rest of it is pretty similar - it's got a very 80s Laura Branigan/Bonnie Tyler feel to it but it's well done, although 13 tracks covering 55 minutes felt like more than I strictly needed.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on their twelfth week of a decent fifty week run - this was as high as it got, but that's still way more success than I remembered.  It was actually its second run - it managed two weeks in the middle of '89, but I guess one of the singles gave it somewhat of a bump with the general public.  The rest of the top five were George Michael (a new entry), The Three Tenors, Elton John and Michael Bolton and we have two more new entries in the top ten - Mariah Carey (#6) and a Joe Jackson best-of (#7 and this is a surprisingly fine collection of tracks).

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting (141 milliPeppers) on the album and most of it tells us this wasn't really a success - and then it was!  It was their second album and released in October '88 - it immediately hit #1 in Sweden (for seven weeks) and sold 511,000 copies there.  For reference, there are approximately 10 million people in Sweden, which means that 1 in every 20 people own a copy of this album!  

Success globally came somewhat more slowly - allegedly it can all be traced back to Dean Cushman, an American exchange student from Minneapolis buying the album in Sweden, giving it to his local radio station when he got home and people really liked "The Look".  Which, if true, is some impressive pandemic source tracking!  Somewhat surprisingly, Roxette had FOUR US #1 singles in their career - "The Look" and "Listen To Your Heart" from this album, "It Must Have Been Love" (obviously) and "Joyride" (they had two #2 singles as well).

The critics were pretty mixed on the album - they liked the singles but found the rest of it pretty disposable, which I agree is true but that's kinda the point to it, isn't it?  Whatever the point to it, it's done phenomenally well globally with it selling over nine million copies - which is a lot of units to shift.

"Customers also listened to" Cyndi Lauper, John Farnham, Bonnie Tyler, The Bangles, Belinda Carlisle and Alphaville - I've given you more than normal this week because all of these are spot on.  And it's a sound I generally like - I wouldn't say this album is a prime example of it, but it's a perfectly pleasant listen and takes me back to the time nicely.

02/09/90 - Somewhat lacking lyrically
16/09/90 - A surprisingly successful album