And it's raining like it did in Leningrad

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

09/02/24 : Prelude To Ecstasy - The Last Dinner Party

Somewhat surprisingly, I saw these guys live twice last year - they have a great stage presence and I was hoping it would transfer to vinyl (well, streaming anyway).

Yeah, it's got quite the personality to it - I liked it.  When I wrote up about seeing them at Glastonbury I said "they'd definitely been listening to their mum's Siouxsie albums" and that's only reinforced here.  It's not that they've directly copied her, but they've taken the spirit of Siouxsie (particularly the vocal delivery) and infused it into a pretty modern sounding album - I liked it and I'd like to remember to listen to it again.

We're at, yes, #1 with a new entry and the rest of the top five are Jamie Webster (another new entry), Noah Kahan, The Weeknd and Taylor Swift and the next highest new entry is a somewhat unexpected Band On The Run by Wings (#16 - it's a 50th anniversary edition).  I've not reviewed it yet, but somewhat bizarrely it was mentioned in a post for 2010 as an unexpected new entry at #17...

Last week I said that James Arthur would drop to #37, so imagine my surprise when I see him at #38 - it's almost like I know what I'm talking about at times.  I'm somewhat unsure about The Last Dinner Party though because they don't really fit into any particular category - I can think of arguments for the 20s, 40s and 80s, so let's take the middle path and say #43.  And this week's Taylor stats are impressive even for her - three in the top ten, five in the top twenty and nine in the entire chart, all because she mentioned that she's going to release another album (which isn't really the most surprising news ever).

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album, but remarkably little content - most of it is the critics saying how much they liked it, with the guy from Record Collector saying it brought Suede's Dog Man Star to mind and I can see that.  The band members' name certainly give off an upper-middle class vibe (Georgia, Lizzie, Abigail, Emily and Aurora) and there are a lot of strings on the album - 8 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos and a double bass.  And it's done well commercially across Europe, getting to #4 in The Netherlands and #2 in Belgium and Ireland.

"Customers also listened to" TJARK, Dolores Forever, Katy Kirby and Royal Otis - none of whom I've heard of, which is slightly unusual for these days (because I'm down with the kids, don't you know?).  But if any of them sound like TLDP then I'd be tempted to check them out because I very much enjoyed this.

02/02/24 - Fine-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing
16/02/24 - Very not good

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