You look a little dressed up - you're acting way too smart

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

11/09/05 : A Bigger Bang - The Rolling Stones

With The Rolling Stones you never know what you're going to get - is this from their surprisingly good, surprisingly bad or surprisingly bland periods?  There's only one way to find out...

It's somewhere between good and bland - I actually liked "Let Me Down Real Slow" and none of it was dreadful, but a whole hour of it was far too much for me to pay attention to I'm afraid.  I'm sure the fans loved it, but there's very little there for me, I'm afraid.  My only other takeaway from it was that, bizarrely, some of the tracks are mastered a lot quieter than the others - which must have been a conscious decision by someone at some point in the process and I've absolutely no idea why anyone would do that.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on the first week of a five week run - a short but sweet visit.  The rest of the top five were James Blunt, (we're going to be saying that a lot in the coming days), Coldplay, Kanye West and KT Tunstall and the next highest new entry was another name from the past - Bob Dylan (#21).

Wikipedia tells me it's their 25th studio album and it was the last album of original material recorded with Charlie Watts before his death in 2021.  It was produced by Don Was and was considered a back-to-basics effort after the "sprawling and eclectic" Bridges To Babylon.  It was supported by a very successful tour which went on for two years and was the highest grossing tour of all time upon completion (and it's still in the top ten, although Taylor has already doubled that number and she's not finished yet).  The critics were generally pretty nice about it and plenty described it as their best album in years, but some also pointed out that people had said that for every Stones album for years.  It did very well commercially, particularly in Europe where it got to #1 in a load of countries - it "only" got to #3 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - well, I wasn't expecting that and I suspect that "more Rolling Stones albums" is probably the most accurate answer.  This wasn't nearly as bad as some of their efforts I've been subjected too whilst also being nowhere near their best efforts - I can understand that some people will put in on from time to time but I struggle to imagine it's overly played in too many houses.

04/09/05 - Giving some people what they want
18/09/05 - The beginning of the end