I'm supposed to be the soldier who never blows his composure

Completing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

02/01/05 : Encore - Eminem

I like a bit of Eminem, but I seem to recall the singles around this time held less interest for me and I've never listened to this album, so let's see what we've got.

Hmmm - I don't think it's up there with his best.  I did quite like "Like Toy Soldiers", "Spend Some Time" (it's nicely different) and "Mockingbird", but there's a lot of other less memorable stuff on there.  A lot of it is actually quite hard to understand and not just for reasons of speed (which is usually the problem I have with his stuff), the words are just less clear than usual.  It also seems more obviously juvenile than most of his stuff with pee-pees, farts and vomit all featuring in various places.  It could also have done with some judicious editing - 65 minutes is just too long.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on his eighth week of a 31 week run with it having peaked at #1 for its first two weeks.  The rest of the top five were Green Day, Scissor Sisters, Maroon 5 and The Killers and, somewhat surprisingly for Xmas/New Year week, there was a new entry and, even more surprisingly, it was a Simon & Garfunkel best-of (#93).  Somewhat less surprisingly, there were a few re-entries this week - THIRTY FOUR of them, with lots of best-ofs but also some pretty peculiar not-so-Christmassy albums including Nevermind, Stop Making Sense (I can't believe I've never reviewed this!), Absolution and The College Dropout.

Wikipedia tells us this is his fifth album and was originally intended to be his last, but he's since done another six - so far.  The critics were nice enough about it, but there's a general feeling it's not his best work, including from Marshall himself - he partially explains it by saying a load of tracks leaked online so had to be scrapped and replaced in a hurry (in case other tracks leaked).  It still did pretty well commercially (although not quite as well as his phenomenally successful preceding albums) getting to #1 in a load of countries, including the US where it sold over five million copies.

"Customers also listened to" D12, 50 Cent, Obie Trice and Dr Dre - the usual suspects!  This isn't as dreadful as a whole load of rap albums out there, but it's not up to his usual standards - and I feel quite safe in saying that because the man himself agrees with me.

And with that, we're done with 2005 - a write-up will follow, but I have to admit it was a much better year than I was expecting.

2005 - Another year finished!
09/01/05 - A strange absence of impact