Me at the zoo

2005 was picked somewhat randomly with pretty low expectations but it did surprisingly well...

Before we go any further, I have to offer ten points if you can relate the title and picture of this post to 2005 - I can assure you I would never have got this.  Back to the music, we start with the ownership ratio which was actually higher than I expected this year - 28.9%!  And there were a few more in there that were previous visits so we might have hit the mighty 33% under different circumstances!

Looking at the best selling albums of the year, I don't think anyone will be surprised to see James Blunt top of the pile - the lad sold 2.3 million albums this year, more than 300k ahead of Coldplay in second place (although they did have five months less available to them that he did).  The rest of the top five were Robbie Williams (who sold 1.4m copies in a mere two months), Kaiser Chiefs and (somewhat surprisingly) Gorillaz.

Other albums that jump out at me from the top ten are KT Tunstall (#7) and Kelly Clarkson (#8 - I don't remember it doing nearly as well as that.  Looking further down, there are some decent enough albums there but nothing that surprising although it is worth mentioning Il Divo (#14 and #48), G4 (#26) and Katharine Jenkins (#48) - we were loving that classical-ish schtick back then, weren't we?  But looking at the year-end top 50 , I'd say that whilst there are albums I don't like and too many best-ofs in it, there are a very few albums that I'd describe as irredeemably worthless and considerably fewer best-ofs than we've seen in other years - which we have to take as a win!  Along with G4, the only other artists with multiple albums on the year-end list are the slightly odd combination of Mariah Carey (#31 and #40) and Franz Ferdinand (squeaking on at #45 and #50).

Looking at the albums I reviewed, the year started very well for the women with them taking five of the first seven weeks - but it went rapidly downhill after that and there were no women at all in the last nine weeks of the year.  Starting off with the solo women we did see, I've got the somewhat unexpected pairing of Madonna and Kelly Clarkson as top of the pile for two pretty decent albums.  Kelly also gets a mention for joining a select group of people who I've reviewed twice having forgotten I've already visited the album - The Police are the only other people I can remember I've done this for but, let's face, it could have happened loads of times!

Considering the rest of the female solo artists, Kate Bush, Jem, Natalie Imbruglia, Katie Melua, Charlotte Church and Jennifer Lopez all had some nice tracks out there, but not enough of a quality bar or variety to make their album work for me.  We only had the one all-woman group this year, with me describing the Sugababes' effort as "an ocean of adequacy" so it's possibly unsurprising that I've not revisited it.  And finally, there are the groups with a strong female presence - Goldfrapp (which I knew and liked), Garbage (which I expected to like and didn't), Scissor Sisters (which I didn't expect to like and very much did), The Magic Numbers and The White Stripes (which were both somewhere in the middle on both fronts) and Black Eyed Peas (which I didn't expect to like, but nothing could have prepared me for the sheer awfulness of it).

Looking at the men, bands with 3-5 guys in them were very much in vogue this year.  Of that lot, the best for me were Keane, Stereophonics (I must listen to this again), The Killers, Doves, The Bravery, Kasabian and the first Franz Ferdinand.  Most of the rest are perfectly fine if somewhat unexceptional but I feel have to mention Coldplay because SO many albums were compared with them this year, with Athlete in particular coing very close to them in many places.  I'm also going to mention Oasis for being considerably poorer than all the rest (along with bits of Razorlight's effort) and System Of A Down for being considerably stranger than all the rest (it really is a very bizarre album).

Looking at the solo guys, they all pretty much delivered as expected - I think Bruce Springsteen probably produced the best offering for me and I'm also going to call out 50 Cent for not being nearly as bad as I expected.  Most of the rest were perfectly fine, although Akon, Daniel Powter and Lee Ryan were all very much not my kind of thing - I also feel I have to mention Steve Brookstein who had a #1 album this year which we should have listened to, but Simon Cowell put paid to that by expunging him from the internet.  And that only leaves us with two albums that don't fit into any of the categories so far which are The Chemical Brothers and Jeff Wayne - both of which I liked.

Looking at the other statistics of interest, the number of different albums we saw at #1 this year was 32 with 24 debuts, compared with 17 and 9 for 1999 and 34 and 29 for 2006 which are the closest years we have to look at it and they fit with the general trend of those numbers going up.  However, the numbers would have been way higher without James Blunt taking nine weeks at the top and Eminem and Coldplay also taking four weeks each.  The most popular blog post of the year was a somewhat surprising Daniel Powter (maybe more people remembered it than I was expecting) and the least popular posts were Jamie Cullum and Akon - solo male artists are obviously somewhat polarising.

The generally accepted (by the internet or me) best albums from the year that we never got close to seeing were I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning by Bright Eyes (peaked at a surprisingly high #23), Takk by Sigur Ros (#16), Illinois by Sufjan Stevens (never charted), Alligator by The National (never charted, which is a shame), I Am A Bird Now by Antony & The Johnsons (#16), Arular by M.I.A (#98 - it deserved far better than this), A Certain Trigger by Maximo Park (#15), Extraordinary Machine by Fiona Apple (never charted), Picaresque by The Decemberists (never charted - I really like this album), Witching Hour by Ladytron (#81 - another album that deserved better), Z by My Morning Jacket (#74), Be by Common (#38), LCD Soundsystem by you-can-probably-guess (#20), Ruby Blue by Roisin Murphy (#88 - WHAT?!?), Vitalic by OK Cowboy (#95), The Woods by Sleater-Kinney (never charted), Ghost Reveries by Opeth (#62), Robyn by Robyn (#11, but not until '08) and Gimme Fiction by Spoon (never charted).

As I said, I didn't have a great deal of confidence in 2005 to deliver me any decent music, but having made it all the way through, I have to say things were way better than I expected with some nice first time listens and a load of the re-listens being a lot better than I remembered them being.  Picking a top four for the year, I'd have to go with a selection I own - Keane's Hope And Fears, The Killers' Hot Fuss and the eponymous debuts from Franz Ferdinand and Kasabian (and yes, there are four because I couldn't decide which one to lose to make a top three).  I'm also going to be pick a couple of first time listens which definitely feel like they deserve a revisit which are Stereophonics' Language, Sex, Violence, Other? and Bruce Springsteen's Dust And Devils.  And finally I have to name-check Black Eyed Peas for producing what was OBVIOUSLY the worst album of the year - it's streets ahead (behind?) of anything else (and there were albums from Lee Ryan and Oasis in there!).

The only decades left which have only had one visit so far are the 60s and the 10s - so obviously we should do one from the 60s to provide some contrast.  And we've only seen '68 so far, so let's pick an early one - I'm going for 1961 and expecting a large amount of the music that's served up to be very, very uncool. 

And "me at the zoo" was the title of the very first YouTube video which was uploaded in this year - give yourself ten points if you knew that.

02/01/05 - Not his finest effort to end the year
31/12/61 - Not his finest effort to start the year