He's not sorry for what he's done

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

23/01/77 : Johnny The Fox - Thin Lizzy

Our second visit with Thin Lizzy this year - I was disappointingly unimpressed last time so am hoping for better this time.

Yeah, as much as I remember the previous album, at first listen this went down a lot better.  I mean, it's not remarkable - it's pretty standard 70s rock but there's some decent enough hooky riffs and guitar work in there.  And that's all I've got to say about it really - it kinda delivers what I expected it to (in a much better way than our previous visit) and at 36 minutes it doesn't hang around too long doing so.

We're at #20 this week on their second week of a thirteen week run which is a decent enough effort by itself but it's actually their second run, with them having spent ten weeks previously before having a two week rest - I assume a single was responsible for the resurgence of interest.  The top five this week were Slim Whitman, ABBA, Stevie Wonder, David Soul and ABBA again with a best-of and the highest new entry was Hit Scene (#19) - which is a compilation album with a strange mix of tracks anyone would recognise and ones no-one would.

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album (105 milliPeppers) and it was their seventh album and the last to feature guitarist Brian Robertson "as the personality clashes between him and Lynott resulted in Robertson being sacked, reinstated, and later sacked again".  Phil Lynott wrote the songs in hospital recovering from hepatitis and it seems like him and Brian then spent a lot of time arguing as to whether they were shite or not.  Apparently Phil Collins played on some tracks but no-one can remember which ones and the critics were nice enough about it, although they couldn't agree whether it was better or worse than their previous album.  Commercially, it did best here but achieved something in a few random countries - #17 in Sweden and #52 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" Emerson Rose, Cheap Trick, Deep Purple and Blue Oyster Cult - it's fair to say they are not my sort of thing at all.  I have a bit of a soft spot for Thin Lizzy though (partly because Phil Lynott was Leslie Crowther's son-in-law and I like to imagine how their family get-togethers were) and whilst this album isn't exactly spectacular, it's more in line with what I was expecting and it passed the time acceptably.

16/01/77 - Just too long
30/01/77 - A lovely voice

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more