It wasn't the best I ever had - not even close

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

01/05/05 : Devils & Dust - Bruce Springsteen

I think I listened to this back in the day and he was going through one of his stripped back phases - I seem to recall the songs are fine, but nothing special.  

Yeah, he's definitely got the acoustic guitars out for this album - it feels quite early Dylan-ish in places.  It doesn't quite hit the spot for me but there's absolutely no doubting the levels of skill both in the writing and performing on display.  I also particularly liked the title track - it's a strong opener to the album.

We're at #1 with a new entry this week on the start of an eight week run - although you can be sure that it would have done absolutely nothing if it had been by anyone else.  The rest of the top five were Akon and best-ofs from the slightly strange combination of Basement Jaxx, Tony Christie and Shakin' Stevens - you forget how big ol' Shakey was back in the day but he had 15 top ten singles in the 80s, including three #1s!  The next highest new entry is Eels (#16) with an album I might have to check out because I've not heard and I do like a bit of Eels.

Wikipedia tells it's his thirteenth album and his third acoustic album, after Nebraska and The Ghost Of Tom Joad - and from my limited experience of them all, it sits firmer between the two in terms of quality.  We've also got a spot of controversy - Starbucks was considered as one of the main retail outlets for the album but it fell through for a couple of slightly different reasons.  Starbucks weren't happy about "Reno" having a passing reference to anal sex but Bruce - well, Bruce didn't want it to happen!  The critics raved about the album (it feels very critic friendly) and it probably won't surprise you to hear it did pretty well commercially with it also getting to #1 in the US, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden and Spain!

"Customers also listened to" John Mellancamp, Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler and Jackson Browne - all fine musicians indeed.  As is The Boss - this might not be exactly the sort of thing most of his fans wanted him to be doing, but for me he's earned the right to do whatever he feels like doing and he does this stuff well.

24/04/05 - Well, it could have been worse...
08/05/05 - Not quite my thing, but certainly skilful

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