In case you haven't noticed - well, everybody's tired

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

15/03/24 : Eternal Sunshine - Ariana Grande

And in somewhat unsurprising news, we're meeting Ariana this week - my suspicion is that it will be very Ariana-like but I've also no real clue what I mean by that...

Yeah - it's Ariana-like.  Tuneful with some good tracks on it ("Yes, And?" was probably my favourite) but it's a bit too warbly over the course of a whole album for my liking.  Last time we met her, the lass was having an awful lot of sex, but this album very much suggests that relationship is over and I think it's safe to say it didn't end well but I find her voice too annoying to pay attention to, so I can't give you any more details - I do like the album cover though.  In my previous post (from 2020) I also mentioned that I was hoping that one day I'd be able to forgive her for Cat Valentine - I can assure you that day has not yet come though

For a change this week, we also have a guest reviewer - I was catching up with the album in the car when I was giving my youngest a lift and her pithy (and accurate) comment on the album is that it's "catchy but same-same" - I do hope she's not going to set herself up as competition.

We're at (of course) #1 with a new entry this week - I suspect she'll be hanging around for a bit.  The rest of the top five were a very surprising Judas Priest (a new entry - their first charting album was in '77 but this is their highest placing ever!), The Weeknd best-of (I'd completely forgotten I'd listened to this and only found the post by chance when I was looking for something else), Noah Kahan and Bleachers (another new entry - apparently this is basically Jack Antonoff who is best known for his work with Taylor) and the next highest new entry is Grace Petrie (#28), closely followed by, obviously, Bananarama (#30).

Last week I said that Liam Gallagher and John Squire would drop to #13 and I felt I was being generous with that, so I'm amazed to see they're at #7.  Ariana feels like she'll do even better so let's go with #5 for her and this week's Taylor stats are one in the top ten, four in the top twenty and nine in the entire chart.

Wikipedia has loads on the album, but very little of interest.  The title is a reference to the film, particularly the concept of erasing the memory of previous relationships (I told you it didn't end well) and the album wasn't expected to appear until this year until she's finished filming Wicked, but the SAG-AFRA strike meant she had some time on her hands.  The critics were pretty nice about the album, considering it mature and restrained, although some of them would have liked better lyrics on there.  The public don't really care what the critics think though and it's got to #1 in a whole load of countries.

"Customers also listened to" Matt Champion (huh?), SZA, Zara Larsson and Tate McRae - one of those things is not the same.  I didn't mind this, but it felt a bit light on content to really grab my attention - I suspect Ariana can live without my approval though.

08/03/24 - Inessential and hackneyed, but well-done nonetheless
22/03/24 - Mildly disappointing