We could leave the Christmas lights up 'til January

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

29/12/23 : Lover - Taylor Swift

I really wasn't expecting THIS to end the year - I considered skipping over it to give the place to someone more in need of the attention, but that just takes us to another Taylor album!  And if I skip over that as well, we go all the way down to #24 for Lana del Rey's break-out album from '12, which doesn't really feel like it needs the publicity given it's been on the chart for longer than Taylor has (230 vs 210 weeks).  So let's just get it over with, shall we?

As expected, I find this to be "absolutely fine" - it's a set of decent enough tracks performed competently, but I really don't see what makes the Swifties go absolutely nuts for it.  It's got more of an 80s sound to it than I was expecting and she does get a bit whine-y at times, but apart from that I've really got nothing to say about it.  And let's face it - whatever I had to say about it wouldn't make the slightest difference to anyone's opinion of it.

We're all the way down at #15 this week (and it's immediately followed by Folklore and Reputations) on a strange post-Xmas chart.  It's on the 36th week of its current run, which is its fifth, giving it 210 weeks in total (of which it spent the first at #1 in September '19) making it her second most successful album in terms of weeks (after 1989).  The top five this week are Bublé, Taylor (speak of the devil) and best-ofs from The Weeknd, Elton John and ABBA (which, coincidentally, is where we started this year).

Last week I randomly guessed that Noah would stay put at #6 - he dropped to #8, but I consider that close enough to be a moral victory, so I'm going to suggest that Taylor will also stay in the same place.  And her overall chart stats are two in the top ten, five in the top twenty and nine in the overall chart.  A couple of other points that jumped out at me this week - there are THIRTEEN Xmas albums in the chart this week and what on earth is Kanye West's Graduation doing at #39?

Wikipedia has the expected massive amount (606 milliPeppers) - I couldn't be arsed reading any of it.  The critics were actually pretty nice about the album but they could have torn into it and it wouldn't have made any difference - it got to #1 in a gazillion countries and was generally top five everywhere else, except for Iceland (#18) and South Korea (#36).  It has also made the year-end top 100 chart in the US every year since it's been released (#9 this year!).

"Customers also listened to" Olivia Rodrigo, Harry Styles, Gracie Abrams and Sabrina Carpenters - never heard of any of 'em!  That's not strictly true (I've even seen Sabrina live this year) but they're positive unknowns when compared with Taylor's star wattage - and this album was absolutely no help in unravelling the mystery of it all for me.

22/12/23 - Possibly the album I've heard most this year
2023 - A mixed year on all fronts

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