While I was watching you did a slow dissolve

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

30/10/05 : Life In Slow Motion - David Gray

I obviously know White Ladder and I also own A New Day At Midnight which I thought were his first two albums (but it turns out I was so wrong - White Ladder is his fourth) - I'm not aware I've ever come across this, but I struggle to imagine it's going to be his swerve into Scandi death metal.

Nope, it's Dave with his nice sounding voice and his nice sounding piano and very nice sounding it all is too - although not exactly memorable in that it just doesn't have any tracks that stand out in the way that White Ladder has.  I feel I should have more to say about it than that, but I really don't - I liked it and I'd be happy to listen to it again, but that's all I got.

We're at #11 in the charts this week on his seventh week of a 23 week run with it having peaked at #1 for his first two weeks - which is considerably more successful than I remembered it being.  The top five this week were Robbie Williams (a new entry), the Prodigy best-of, Sugababes, Katie Melua and James Blunt and there are two more new entries in the top ten - best-ofs from Destiny's Child (#6) and Supertramp (#9).

Wikipedia includes some bizarre information - it was his first album to feature a cello player and the album was released in DualDisc format (a CD on one side, a DVD on the other).  The critics thought it was a better album than A New Day At Midnight and it did well commercially - #1 in Ireland as well as here and #16 in the US, selling 500,000 copies over there and it sold an amazing 750,000 copies here, which is a lot for an album that's almost completely forgotten about these days.

"Customers also listened to" Damien Rice, Ray LaMontagne, Paolo Nutini and Amos Lee - I don't know Amos but the others are very much in the same area.  I think David has the edge on most of them though - his voice just has a great depth of emotion to it.  All of which makes me feel I should have more to say about this album - but I don't.

23/10/05 - All a bit underwhelming 
06/11/05 - Offensively inoffensive

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