Yesterday, you asked me something I thought you knew

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

04/09/05 : Wonderland - McFly

McFly, like Busted, aren't aiming to break any musical boundaries but they want to give people a good time and, whilst they're not aiming for me as their target audience, I can't help but admire them - and sometimes even find myself unexpectedly enjoying them.  I'm not sure I've ever listened to a full album from them though - until now.

Yeah, it's all perfectly fine - a bit less teen-oriented than I was expecting with Dodgy or Ocean Colour Scene being the closest touchpoints for me.  It's definitely not breaking any moulds or pushing any boundaries but they're all nice enough tunes, competently executed.  I particularly liked "All About You" but found "She Falls Asleep - Part 1" most peculiar with its very out of place orchestral introduction - I couldn't help but feel someone was getting ideas above their station.  But overall, there's very little to complain about here.

We're at #1 in the chart this week with a new entry on their start of a nineteen week run which seems like a decent effort from the lads.  The rest of the top five were Kanye West (a new entry and he must have HATED being beaten by McFly - I wonder if that was the root cause of all his issues?), James Blunt, Coldplay and Kaiser Chiefs and the next highest new entry was Eric Clapton (#19 - all the oldies were out in force this year).

Wikipedia tells us this is their second album and made them the youngest band to ever top the album charts twice - I suspect that record's been broken many times since but I really don't care enough to investigate.  The critics were nice enough in a "well, I was expecting far worse" kinda way - "one might sneer, but Wonderland was a good album from an obviously talented group of young lads" has got it about right for me.  Commercially, it wasn't quite as successful as their debut over here, but had some surprising success globally including #61 in Japan and #70 in South Korea - an early reverse K-pop manoeuvre.

"Customers also listened to" Busted, McBusted, Danny Jones and Matt Willis - not the most surprisingly selection of names, I guess.  I found this all perfectly fine and pretty much indistinguishable from Busted - it's giving some people what they want without annoying me, so I'm happy to let them get on with it.

28/08/05 - Enjoyably different
11/09/05 - Not much here for me

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