How obvious should a girl be?

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

11/12/05 : Taller In More Ways - Sugababes

I can't claim to be the 'babes biggest fan, but they did some decent enough singles, didn't they?  So this will either be surprisingly decent or will have the odd rare high spot in an ocean of mediocrity - and I'm not sure which I'm expecting.

Well, it starts with "Push The Button" which can't really be faulted and "Obsession" is the only other one I know (from the Animotion original) which is also fine enough.  But it would be harsh to describe the rest as an ocean of mediocrity - let's go for an ocean of adequacy, shall we?  It's all perfectly fine but mostly unremarkable - which I suspect may be a recurring theme throughout the year.

We're at #8 in the charts this week on their ninth week of a surprising 37 week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its debut week.  The top five this week were the Eminem best-of, Robbie Williams, Westlife, the Take That best-of and Madonna and the highest new entry was Girls Aloud (#11 - and I was surprised to see this was as high as it got).

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album (185 milliPeppers) and it tells me it's their fourth album and Mutya left the month after it was released, so they re-released it in March '06 with a new band member (Amelie), a new song and new vocals for some of the tracks, including their next two singles (and you can bet they changed the album cover as well).  Unusually, the entry lists a lot of other people's songs that display similarities with tracks on the album - "It Ain't Easy" has no less than three people comparing it to Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" (and re-listening to it, it's certainly shares the same inspiration).  I also learned a new word from the entry - apparently "Push The Button" was inspired by a limerance experienced by Keisha Buchanan, which is (as I'm sure you know) "the state of being obsessively infatuated with someone".  

There's quite the range of songwriters involved on the album (including Cameron McVey of Massive Attack and Cathy Dennis) but I'm pretty pleased to say that a large proportion of the album is written by the girls themselves.  The critics were generally quite nice about it (despite all the comparisons with other artists) and it did better commercially away from here than I was expecting, getting to #7 in Ireland, #6 in Switzerland and #5 in Austria.

"Customers also listened to" Girls Aloud, All Saints, The Saturdays and Jamelia - girl power!  And maybe Sugababes aren't viewed as quite top rank amongst girl groups, but there was nothing wrong with this album with the high points being pleasingly quality and none of it being truly dreadful.  High praise indeed - the women are doing OK so far this year!

04/12/05 - Very enjoyable
18/12/05 - Yeah, I liked this

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