When you make plans, they never work

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

01/12/23 : This Life - Take That

For a band that I've mentioned a lot, I'm somewhat surprised this is only my third visit with the lads - and one of them was a greatest hits.  But, obviously, I'm massively looking forward to listening to this, aren't I?  Well...

To be fair to the lads (and it pains me to be so) none of this is horrible, but I do find it all a bit puzzling because, for some completely unclear reason, it seems like they've decided they want to be the Bee Gees on this album.  It's got a very 70s middle-of-the-road feel to it, but with added high tremolo - although, to be fair, they could have been doing this for years and I wouldn't have known.  But, assuming they haven't been, I'm sure the fans will accept it (because they LOVE Take That in whatever guise they exist) but I struggle to see too many new fans being attracted to this sort of thing.  

We're (of course) at #1 with a new entry this week and the rest of the top five are Taylor, The Rolling Stones (this is hanging around way longer than I expected), Bublé (yay) and Olivia Rodrigo (this album has yet to leave the top ten in the 12 weeks since its release).  The next highest new entry is a Tina Turner best-of (#16 - which seems quite high to me) and the only other one in the entire chart is a The 1975 live album (#46) which I struggle to imagine ANYONE caring enough about to listen to it.

Last week I said that Madness would drop to #51 and I'm most amused to see that if I'd just stuck with #34 which I'd randomly used for the previous three weeks then I'd have been pretty close because they are at #26.  I don't, however, imagine that Take That are going to drop to #34 - some research (it's not all random guesses, honest!) tells me that their last three studio albums have dropped to #5 or #6, so I'm going to go for #5.  And this weeks Taylor stats are FOUR in the top ten (WHAT?!?), seven in the top thirty and ten in the entire chart - although I've only just noticed that both versions of 1989 are in the chart so it's not really ten now, is it? (although both daughters have mentioned that, much to their chagrin, they actually think the original version is better).

Wikipedia has remarkably little on the album for a #1 album by an established artist - it's their ninth studio album and their first in six years (they've not been lacking in attention in the intervening period though).  And that's pretty much all there is of interest, although it's amusing to note the contribution from each member of the group - Gary is credited with vocals, keyboards, synthesisers, programming, piano, MIDI strings, percussion and synth bass, Mark gets vocals and electric guitar on one track and Howard just gets vocals.  It's also interesting to note that, for a group that's so massive over here, they do very little elsewhere except for Ireland, where it's also #1.

"Customers also listen to" Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, Robbie Williams and Rick Astley - yup, I'm fine without any of those albums.  As I will be without this album from this point forward, but I'm still somewhat perplexed as to what exactly they were trying to do with it.

24/11/23 - Well, I wasn't expecting that!
08/12/23 - Really enjoyable