You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains

Starting my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

25/12/05 : Face To Face - Westlife

So it seems if we're not starting the year with Take That (and if we hadn't already listened to Robbie Williams, we'd have been 20% of the way there), we're starting it with the other lot - oh joy!  I'm expecting this to be bearable torture replete with fiddles, choirs and key changes...

Well, they have reeled in the fiddles and the choirs, but don't worry, there's still plenty of key changes.  It is what it is - you either like it or you don't.  And I don't - but I'd struggle to describe it as unbearable.  And let's leave it there before I change my mind about being rude about it.

This week we're #4 in the charts on their eighth week of a 22 week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its debut week - come on people, I might manage to avoid being rude about it but it's not really not that good an album.  The rest of the top five were Curtain Call, the Eminem best-of (its fourth week at the top back then - it's currently at #13 on its 630th week in the charts), James Blunt, Robbie Williams and the Take That best-of (ah, there they are!) and the highest new entry was Notorious B.I.G. (#78 with his second posthumous album).

Wikipedia has remarkably little on the album.  It's their sixth offering, it features a load of covers (originally by Secret Garden, Human Nature, Diana Ross, Eagles, Collin Raye and Nick Carter) and, somewhat bizarrely, "the album had more than 10,000 legal copies sold in mainland China" - but my favourite fact was that the string arrangement was done by Dave Arch, who's slightly better known these days for his work on Strictly.  Funnily enough, it did quite well commercially - also getting to #1 in Australia and (go on, guess) Ireland and it was #6 in our year-end chart.

"Customers also listened to" Shane Filan, Kian Egan, Shayne Ward and Ronan Keating - no, no, no and, errr, no for me.  As is also true for Westlife, but I do find myself becoming somewhat immune to their - whatever the opposite of "charms" is.  It just all sounds the same to me and if that's what people REALLY want, then I guess I'm pleased they have Westlife to deliver it to them.

1977 - A mixed bag of a year
18/12/05 - Yeah, I liked this

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