Twenty-eight K for the Birkin

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

19/01/24 : Rolling Stone - D-Block Europe

D-Block Europe have been mentioned FIVE times over the past three years as having the highest new entry in a given week, but so far my only musical experience of them is when I saw them at Reading, which got me very bored very quickly - so my expectations aren't massively high for this.

And whatever expectations I had were comfortably failed to be met - this is an exceptionally dull album.  It reminded me of Drake's efforts to convince me of his musical genius and, like him, they're obsessed with pussy and dollars - but they love the vocoder even more than he does.  And a whole album of it is very, very tiresome.  

We're at (of course), #1 with a new entry this week on the chart and the rest of the top five are 21 Savage (another new entry), The Vaccines (ditto), Noah Kahan and The Weeknd best-of and the next highest new entry is Bill Ryder-Jones (#30 - he's the lead singer of The Coral).  

Last week I predicted that Shed Seven would drop to #77 and I'm pleased to see they massively exceeded my expectations by only dropping to #29 - which is a very reasonable result for the lads.  Unfortunately, I suspect D-Block Europe are going to easily beat that - I'm going for #13 which is wildly undeserved.  And this week's Taylor stats are one in the top ten, five in the top twenty (#14-#17 are block booked by her) and nine in the entire chart.

Wikipedia tells me this is their third album (not to be confused with their six mixtapes) and they've sold out four nights at The O2 on the back of it - there's no accounting for tastes, I guess.  The critics were pretty mixed on it - the general theme seems to be that they quite like the style, but maybe it's time for them to do something new.  The Guardian also gets it spot on for me with "anything that approaches depth on the album is immediately overlooked in favour of misogynistic sex talk or tirades about luxury items".  Commercially, it's also charted in Ireland (#15) but the rest of the world seem impervious to its "charms".

"Customers also listened to" 6ix9ine, Hermitude, Nafe Smallz and Liam Brady - it's pretty rare we get a full set that I've never heard of these days.  However, I think we've established that this is very much not my kind of thing - I REALLY don't understand the appeal.  However, I suspect they really don't care about my opinion - and quite rightly so!

12/01/24 - Perfectly acceptable
26/01/24 - Yeah, I liked this

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