Who made up all the rules?

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

26/06/05 : Finally Woken - Jem

From Jamoriquai to Jem - I'll be surprised if we've had too many neighbours so close in the alphabet.  This is another album I owned - I seem to recall it's fine but not as good as the single that everyone loved.

Yeah, it's fine but it suffers because that single ("They") is the opening track and it really is a cracker.  And some of the other tracks are also a lot better than I expected (the title track and one other track which I've completely forgotten jumped out at me as better than the rest) but none of them are dreadful. It feels like she suffered from the tracks, apart from "They", not being quite as good as Dido or Beth Orton's output because she's definitely aiming for the same market - there's an argument that a few of the tracks have potential to be up there, but unfortunately potential is really all they show.  But "They" is really a very good track indeed...

We're at #6 this week on, strangely, her 18th week of a 34 week run with this being the highest it got (and it had quite the rollercoaster ride across the run).  The top five this week were Coldplay, James Blunt, Jamiroquai (a new entry), Foo Fighters and Faithless (it's weird to think how well this album would have done with Coldplay and Jamie B on the scene) and the next highest entry was The Ordinary Boys at #31.

Wikipedia has three whole sentences on the album, which feels a little harsh on what isn't a terrible album - especially when it tells us it's sold over half a million copies here and 300k copes in the US.  The only other item of interest is that Yoad Nevo plays 11 different instruments on the album, including somewhat unexpectedly the "water bottle".  Commercially it did OK in Ireland (#15) but that was pretty much it with it only getting to #198 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" Bitter Sweet, Sneaker Pimps, Goldfrapp and Ivy - a 50% hit rate for me there, but I'm not sure I really feel the connection with the names I know.  Part of me has a soft spot for Jem (although she didn't help herself when I saw her at Glasto and she was very, very dull) and this is a fine enough album but, with hindsight, it's not like she followed it up with anything particularly memorable.

19/06/05 - Really not good
03/07/05 - Perfectly acceptable, but perfectly inessential


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