Dinner at eight, that sounds fine - I suppose that means you'll turn up 'round nine

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

02/10/05 : Catching Tales - Jamie Cullum

Jamie's an interesting one because I found him personally quite annoying, but didn't mind his music - where I usually find that jazzy-pop thing quite annoying.  I'm expecting this to be perfectly fine if not exactly my kind of thing.

Yeah - perfectly fine is pretty much where we are.  He's got a nice voice, but it's not quite top tier so there needs to be more to the music than Frank or Bublé might get away with - and he has enough variety and twiddly piano (but not too much) in there to keep it fresh enough.  I mean, I'm not going to rush back to it but it's all perfectly fine - although an hour was maybe a bit more than I needed.

We're at #4 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a thirteen week run - I imagined he'd hung around for years!  The rest of the top five were Katie Melua (a new entry), David Gray, James Blunt and KT Tunstall - it's a clean sweep for the singer-songwriters!  And the next highest new entry was Hayley Westenra (#10) - I'd completely forgotten she even existed!

Wikipedia has remarkably little on the album - it's his fourth and it's a mix of original songs and covers, with the Gershwin's "Fascinating Rhythm" being the oldest cover on there (from 1924) and Doves'  "Catch The Sun" being the newest (from 2000).  There are also some interesting names involved with the original tracks - Allen Touissant, Guy Chambers and Ed Harcourt are the ones I instantly recognise.  The critics were a bit mixed, but it did well commercially with it getting to the top thirty across a lot of Europe - #3 in The Netherlands being its best performance.

"Customers also listened to" Geoff Gascoyne, Lizz Wright, Katie Melua and Gregory Porter - I don't know the first two but the last two are definitely in the same area.  I didn't mind this at all and I was pleased to note during my investigation that he's still married to Sophie Dahl, so the lad's done well out of this post because I've almost forgotten how annoying I used to find him.

25/09/05 - Surprisngly enjoyable in places
09/10/05 - Better than I remembered it being

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