Riding the night - ain't it cool?

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

03/07/05 : Dynamite - Jamiroquai

I'm not sure I was aware Jamiroquai were still going at this point (and I'm fully expecting Wikipedia to point out exactly how wrong this statement is later on) - my expectations are this will be a very competent but inessential album that the core fans loved but no-one else felt the need for.

Yeah, competent but inessential feels about right to me - they do what they do well, but I don't think anyone really needs any more than a couple of albums of it (tbh you can probably get away with just watching their one cool video).  They don't have any didgeridoos on this album though unlike last time, so that's a plus!

We're at #5 in the charts this week on their second week of a fifteen week run, after which it went away for a couple of weeks and then came back for another eight week run with it having peaked at #3 in its first wee.  The rest of the top five were Coldplay, James Blunt, Faithless and Foo Fighters and the highest new entry was Kano, all the way down at #37.

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album - the first sentence is all about how it was released after "Canned Heat" did well having been in Napoleon Dynamite.  I didn't remember that "Seven Days In Sunny June" features in The Devil Wears Prada, which I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting (and Emily Brunt looks soooo young in it).  Critically it did OK except for NME who gave it one star out of five (it's really not that bad) and commercially it did better than I was expecting globally, despite being their first album not to make the top two over here.  It did get to #2 in France though and also got to #3 in Australia, Italy and Switzerland.  And yes, it also tells me their last album came out in 2017, so they're still hanging in there.

"Customers also listened to" The Brand New Heavies, Moloko, Incognito and Daft Punk - which is an interesting mix but not without their high points (Moloko are seriously under-rated imho).  Which is also the case for Jamiroquai, but I can't say that this album features too many of them, but it's all perfectly acceptable, if not essential.

26/06/05 - OK, but suffers from having one great track
10/07/05 - Really not very good

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