Seein' ain't always believin' - just make sure it's the truth that you're seein'

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

29/05/77 : Time Loves A Hero - Little Feat

I'm not sure I've ever even heard of Little Feat, so I've no idea what to expect here - on <minimal body part> name association alone, I'm drawn to Small Faces but I suspect that's not what we're going to be served up.

Hmmm - it's kinda funky soft rock, almost yacht-y at times but not quite.  It glided past quite nicely without really making much of an impression - there's a decent level of skill on display but not a whole load of personality.  With the exception of "Missing You", which is the final track and just has a nice plaintive feel to it - but under normal circumstances I'd have given up way before I got there.  And that's kinda all I've got to say on the matter - I'll be interested to see what "customers also listened to" later on...

This week we're at #9 in the charts on their third week of an eleven week run, with it having peaked at #8 in the previous week - which feels way more successful that I would have imagined this sort of thing being over here.  The top five this week were ABBA, Eagles, 10cc, A Star Is Born and The Beatles with the highest new entry being, quite obviously, Acker Bilk (#6).

Wikipedia isn't the chattiest about the album - it's their sixth album, the cover was by Neon Park (who was apparently most famous for - doing Little Feat album covers!) and Record World were pretty noncommittal on the title track.  The fact that caught my eye the most is that Fred Tackett played the mandocello on "Time Loves A Hero" - apparently it's a large mandolin tuned the same as a cello and it sounds quite nice.

"Customers also listened to" Hot Tuna, Gregg Allman, Joe Walsh and Dave Mason - a selection of people better known for being in other groups.  I didn't mind this but I've pretty much forgotten it already - it didn't feel like something I'd be seeing in 1977 and it'll be interesting to see if we come across them again.

22/05/77 - An interesting album which needs a few more listens
05/06/77 - In which I learn absolutely nothing

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