You say you wander your own land - but when I think about it, I don't see how you can

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

31/07/05 : Hopes And Fears - Keane

Another one we owned and I still check it out every so often - the best tracks on it are great and I seem to recall even the not best ones are still pretty good, but I need to remind myself...

Yes, the best tracks are indeed great and it certainly starts strongly with "Somewhere Only We Know", "Bend & Break", "We Might As Well Be Strangers" and "Everybody's Changing" (probably my favourite).  But actually, the quality doesn't really drop after that and I also really like "Your Eyes Open", "She Has No Time", "Can't Stop Now" (another potential favourite) and "This Is The Last Time".  Yes, it's not rock and roll but it's all a very pleasant and slightly different sound - but I suspect you already know that.

We're at #10 in the charts this week on their 64th week of a 73 week run, with it having spent five weeks at #1 in its first, second, fourth, sixth and (obviously) 52nd week - it also managed another 57 weeks in the charts over six more runs through '06 & '07.  The top five this week were James Blunt, Coldplay, Faithless, Kaiser Chiefs and Crazy Frog (a new entry which it could be argued I should have listened to because it does feature some original music - but that wasn't going to happen) and the next highest new entries are Alanis Morisette (#12) with an acoustic version of Jagged Little Pill (which I had previously checked out and completely forgotten about) and Editors (#13) with The Back Room which went on to much greater things in '06.

Wikipedia has a few paragraphs on the album which boil down to they made it, the critics were either extremely positive or meh (in a "this is not cool" kinda way) about it and then loads of people bought it.  Oh yes, LOADS!  It's sold three million copies here alone and was #2 in the 2004 year end list - it also did very well across Europe and even got to #45 in the US, selling a million copies over there.

"Customers also listened to" Tom Chaplin, Snow Patrol, Coldplay and Travis - I don't think too many people will be surprised by any of those names.  Yes, it's not cool but I really like this album and would consider going to see their 20th anniversary tour show later this year but there are absolutely no tickets available, so it seems like I'm not alone! 

24/07/05 - An odd couple
07/08/05 - Well, it could have been worse, I guess

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