A message to the curious - it's better to not be in love than to be in between

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

29/05/05 : The Invisible Invasion - The Coral

Well, this is a nice surprise!  It's our third visit with a band who are always interesting (and have been going for a long time now) so I'm looking forward to this.

It's the expected Scouse jangly mild psychedelia and a very pleasant change of air it is too - which would be true in general, but is particularly so after the last album.  None of the tracks particularly jumped out at me but it was all nicely put together - it's also interesting that if you'd told me they'd released this last week I'd have quite believed you.  And that's all I've got to say about it really - if you like some pleasingly tuneful and mildly challenging indie pop then give it a go.

We're at #3 in the charts with a new entry at the start of a five week run with this being as high as it got - it burned bright but quickly!  The rest of the top five were Gorillaz (a new entry), Faithless, James Blunt and Audioslave (another new entry that I surprised myself by remembering I'd listened to) and the next highest new entry was Alkaline Trio (#34 - surprisingly, for a band I'd never heard of, they're still going).

Wikipedia tells us this is their fourth album and it was produced by Geoff Barrow and Adrian Uttley from Portishead.  The album originally shipped with XCP which was one of Sony's many copy protection mechanisms but this one sounds like a doozy - it also reported your listening habits back to Sony and exposed your computer to malicious attacks.  Sweet!  The critics were mostly nice enough about the album but quite a few of them banged on about how it wasn't going to break America for them - I'm not entirely sure that's something they've ever been that bothered about, but what do I know?  Commercially, it didn't indeed break the US but it did get to #16 in Ireland and #53 in Japan (which was unexpected).

"Customers also listened to" The Zutons, The Libertines, Embrace and Courteeners - a slightly strange but not unpleasant mix.  I liked this album and it feels that if I listened to it a few more times it would be one I might really get in to - but we all know that's not going to happen.

22/05/05 - Certainly intriguing
05/06/05 - So, so annoying

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