All the red flags you chose to ignore

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

07/06/24 : Believe Me Now? - Becky Hill

Our second visit with Becky - like last time, I'm sure it'll be fine examples of "that sort of thing" which I don't mind when I'm in the mood.

And yeah, it's fine.  I liked "Outside Of Love", "Lonely Again" and "Disconnect" (which features Chase & Status and it's very Chase&Status-y) and all the rest of it is perfectly listenable. The whole album does risk being a bit too much, but I think there's just enough variety across it to stop that happening.  There's nothing here that hasn't been done multiple times before but there's plenty of people who've done it far worse.

We're at #3 with a new entry this week and the rest of the top five are Taylor, Billie, Ateez (another new entry - some very weird K-pop kitchen sink sounds) and Richard Hawley (and another one - feels like the fans will like it, but I always like his songs but not the way he sings them). There are two more new entries in the top ten for Crowded House (#8 - this sounds like, but not as good as, Crowded House) and K-Trap (#10 - UK rap which seemed OK to my uncultured ear). I also checked out a couple more new entries for Richard Thomson (#46 - pretty much as you'd expect it to be) and Bat For Lashes (#73 - ditto).

Last week I said that Twenty One Pilots would drop to #24 and they're at #18, so I'll take that as being in the correct ballpark - I think Becky will do slightly better so I'm going for #13. And this week's Taylor stats are one in the top ten, five in the top thirty and nine in the entire chart and my suspicion is that they'll all be climbing the chart next week as her tour hits the country.

Wikipedia has more than I expected, which somehow manage to contain less than I expected - basically she's released a load of singles from it (seven!) and the critics liked it a lot. It's also charted in some peculiar places - New Zealand (#29), Ireland (#54) and Belgium (#177).

"Customers also listened to" Sonny Fodera, Ella Henderson, Rita Ora and Joel Corry - I don't know Sonny, but the others are very much in the same ballpark. I've got a lot of time for Becky because she's worked hard for her success and she's certainly enjoying it, so I'm pleased this has done so well for her - it's not ground-breaking, but it's all perfectly listenable.

31/05/24 - More enjoyable than I expecting
14/06/24 - I was expecting more

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more