I need just a bit of sweet love, not your bittersweet love

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

02/02/24 : Bitter Sweet Love - James Arthur

Our second visit with the lad and last time I thought it was all a bit bland and pointless - I have absolutely no reason to expect anything different here.

Actually, I'd say this isn't quite bland and almost has a point - yes, it's the obvious mix of plaintive ballads and up-tempo rockier numbers, but they're all well done enough if you like that sort of thing.  No, I'm not going to be rushing back to it but considering he's one of the elder statesmen for this sort of thing (he won X Factor nearly 12 years ago now!) then he's done a decent enough job here.  That's quite some haircut he's got though, isn't it?

We are, of course, at #1 with a new entry this week and the rest of the new entry heavy top five are The Reytons (a new entry), The Smile (ditto from the Radiohead spin off), Noah Kahan and Tom Odell (another one!), with two more new entries in the top ten for Future Islands (#7) and Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes (#10).

Last week I said that Green Day would drop to #18 and I was being somewhat optimistic because they're at #26 - I struggle to imagine James is going to do that well, so let's go for #37.  And this week's Taylor stats are her usual - one in the top ten, five in the top twenty and nine in the entire chart.

Wikipedia has one whole sentence on the album - "Bitter Sweet Love is the fifth studio album by English singer-songwriter James Arthur, released on 26 January 2024 through Columbia Records".  It's done better than I expected commercially in Europe though - #15 in Ireland and #12 in Germany being the highlights.

"Customers also listened to" Tom Odell, Mark Forster, Lewis Capaldi and Tom Grennan - I don't know Mark but none of the other names surprise me, with this album being particularly Grennanish.  It's not really my thing, but I imagine those people who got it to #1 are pleased enough with what he's served them up.

26/01/24 - Yeah, I liked this
09/02/24 - Well worth a listen

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