You were right and I don't want to be here

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

10/04/05 : Counting Down The Days - Natalie Imbruglia

Obviously I like "Torn" (I'm only human, after all) but I'd struggle to name anything else she's done and I know this is a later album so I'm expecting a load of tracks desperately trying to recreate the magic and, to a variety of degrees, failing.

Amusingly, the opening track, "Starting Today", employs a remarkably similar intro to "Torn" but very quickly proves itself to be perfectly fine, but not at the same level.  And "perfectly fine, but not at the same level" is a recurring theme across the whole album - none of it is offensive or terrible, but none of it elevates itself beyond "nice".  I'm sure any diehard Imbrugliarites were happy with it, but I struggle to imagine anyone else overly caring.

Except that we're at a somewhat surprising #1 with a new entry this week on the start of a ten week run and then it came back for another seven week run later in the year, so it seems more people cared than I thought!  The rest of the top five were best-ofs from Tony Christie and Basement Jaxx, Stereophonics and Akon and the next highest new entry was Mariah Carey (#7).  I'm also going to mention the next new entry which was British Sea Power (#13) who I saw at Glastonbury that year because Grant went to school with them so we had to go and see his mates.  And a fantastically quirky little band they were too - and they're still going, although now called Sea Power to distance themselves from an "isolationist, antagonistic nationalism that they don't want to run any risk of being confused with".

Back to Nats, Wikipedia tells me it's her third album and actually a return to radio-friendly pop after she'd taken a few more risks with White Lilies Island, her tricky sophomore offering (which I'm quite looking forward to catching up with now).  The critics were nice enough about it, if somewhat confused by her return to the light and fluffy side - commercially the rest of the world wasn't convinced by it, but we really loved it here.

"Customers also listened to" Sixpence None The Richer (another artist who never rediscovered the magic), The Corrs, Des'ree and Savage Garden - none of whom exactly kick out at musical boundaries.  But sometimes we all need a safe place and this album certainly provides that - if you like some nice tunes sung perfectly well, then this might be what you're looking for.  But I think you'd probably just go for Left Of The Middle, her debut album - which has at least got "Torn" on it.

03/04/05 - Yeah, I liked this
17/04/05 - Underwhelming

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