Running down corridors through automatic doors

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

13/02/05 : Tourist - Athlete

I'm pretty certain I didn't own this but I'm sure I listened to it - I seem to recall I found it enjoyable but insubstantial.  But I could be making that all up...

Well, it's certainly enjoyable and I think insubstantial would be harsh, although I think even its mother would struggle to describe it as deep.  I knew and liked "Wires" and I also quite liked "Half Light" and "Trading Air" as well - the rest of it was all perfectly pleasant with more variety in there than I was expecting.  There's maybe a little too much slow piano on there, which is unnecessarily reminiscent of Coldplay (although his voice is less annoying than Chris Martin's).  I was also very much reminded of Embrace, who I think were around at about the same time.

We're at #3 in the chart this week on a surprisingly long 32 week run with it having debuted (again surprisingly) at #1.  The rest of the top five were Keane, Scissor Sisters, Franz Ferdinand and Green Day (our third one in a row with a decent top five!) and the highest new entry this week was Michael McDonald with a Motown collection (#29).

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album (especially considering how little there was on Hot Fuss) - it's their second album, with the critics noting its more commercial aspects than their debut.  And, unsurprisingly, some of them liked this and some of them didn't - but it appears they all felt the need to comment on it (and Coldplay are mentioned quite a few times as well).  Commercially, it didn't quite have the global impact of Coldplay - away from here, it troubled the lower reaches of the charts in a few European countries but that was it.

"Customers also listened to" Embrace (I told you), Starsailor (yup, them as well), The Magic Numbers (hmmm) and Hard-fi (really?).  Athlete have been somewhat forgotten over the years by the musical consensus but I struggle to see this was any worse than anything else of the ilk that was around this time - I didn't mind it at all.

06/20/05 - Perfectly fine
20/02/05 - One of the finest first halves out there

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more