How long before I get in - before it starts, before I begin?

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

18/09/05 : X&Y - Coldplay

X&Y was one of those albums that most people seemed to love when it came out (I'd be interested to know how much it's listened to these days though), but I was never convinced by it.  I remember liking bits of it, but the whole thing didn't completely work - of course, I've got no actual detail to back that up now so let's see.

Hmmm - yeah, bits of it are indeed very enjoyable with "Speed Of Sound", "Square One" and maybe "Fix You" being my favourites.  I say maybe for "Fix You" because I do like it, but I also can't help but feel I'm being manipulated into liking it - the guys sat down and said "what shall we do to really haul them in?".  Oh well - they did a good job, so I guess I can let them off.  The rest of the album is less successful for me - Chris does his whiny singing on a lot of it and there's not as much variety as I think there should be for what was a highly regarded album.  I'd revisit A Rush Of Blood To The Head and Parachutes before I came back to this.

We're at #4 in the chart this week on its fifteenth week of an impressive 68 week run, with it having peaked at #1 for its first four weeks (and it stayed in the top five until this week) and it's managed an impressive 111 weeks in total with it last being seen for a week in '16.  The rest of the top five this week were David Gray (a new entry), James Blunt, KT Tunstall and Kanye West which is a very British list except for him and we have two more new entries in the top ten from either side of the Atlantic - The Pussycat Dolls (#8) and Paul McCartney (#10).

Wikipedia has loads on the album (340 milliPeppers) - it's their third album and apparently had a "troubled and urgent development", although it also tells me they spent most of '05 on it, so it can't have been all that urgent.  The section on the album cover is interesting - it's an arty representation of the letters X & Y in Baudot code, which was an early form of telegraph communication developed by Emile Baudot in the 1870s.  The critics either loved it or were pretty unimpressed by it - unsurprisingly Q loved it and declared it their album of they year, but I was surprised to see that NME also liked it.  Several also noted the similarities between "Speed Of Sound" and "Clocks" which I don't think I'd realised but it's hard to argue with.  The public didn't care what the critics thought and bought it by the bucketload, except in Hungary where it "only" got to #13.  It was #1 in most other places though (including in the US) and globally it's sold over 13 million copies.  Which is a few, I guess.

"Customers also listened to" Snow Patrol, Keane, U2 and The Killers - some reasonably popular bands there.  As are Coldplay (in case you're not aware) and whilst I like some of what they've done, I don't really understand how they kept it going for quite so long - for me, although it has some decent enough tracks on it, this was already the beginning of the end.

11/09/05 - Not much here for me
25/09/05 - Surprisngly enjoyable in places