So I'm on BBC Two now

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

16/01/05 : Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand

Our second eponymous album in a row and it's another one I own - I remember liking it, but I've not revisited it in years and I suspect there are tracks on here that will have me somewhat scratching my head.  The singles are great though, so I'm looking forward to it.

It is quite a head scratchy album - not because it's not good though but it's just not clear how they managed to get so many people to buy into what's ostensibly an arch, art college project.  I guess it's because the singles are just so good - "Take Me Out" and "The Dark Of The Matinee" stand out in particular for me.  But the rest of the album is still, for me, pretty good and it's close enough to the singles that people probably weren't as scared off as they might have otherwise been.  And it barrels along and is over in 38 minutes so there's no time to get bored with it.  Listening to it again for the first time in a long time, I was also impressed at how it doesn't sound dated at all - it's an "out of time" album that, for me, hasn't aged.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on their 49th week of a 71 week run with it peaking at #3 in its debut week - it also managed another eight week run towards the end of the year, but has never been seen since!  The rest of the top five were The Killers, Scissor Sisters, Green Day,  and Kasabian - the upper reaches of the chart have shown a surprisingly level of quality at the beginning of this year.  And the highest new entry is a curious one - John Legend's debut album Get Lifted which got to #12 in 2006 but #56 was as high as it got in its initial 10 week run.  And that was the only new entry for the week!

Wikipedia has a reasonable amount on the album but nearly all of it relates to how well it did - the only other fact of interest that I noted was that it was recorded in Sweden, which seems a bit random.  The critics loved it and it won the Mercury music prize in '04, beating some impressive competition including Keane, Snow Patrol, Amy Winehouse, The Streets and The Zutons.  It also did surprisingly well globally, making the top twenty in a lot of European countries and #32 in the US, selling a million copies over there to match its performance here.

"Customers also listened to" The Strokes, The Fratellis, The Hives and Kaiser Chiefs, with two albums from each band appearing giving us a very close correlation - and there's certainly a large amount of knowing archness across the board there.  But Franz are quite possibly the kings of archness out of that lot, but for me they managed to keep things real - they trod the path they wanted to and somehow managed to convince people to follow them.  And, obviously, producing an album as decent as this certainly helped their cause.

09/01/05 - A strange absence of impact
23/01/05 - An enjoyable revisit