I'm your number one - yeah, it's so obvious

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

14/06/24 : Brat - Charli XCX

Our second visit with Charli (or our third if you include a fleeting visit at Reading) - my expectations are much higher for this than you might expect. I think it's fair to say I'm not your average Charli XCX fan but she's got a quite a few very decent tracks in her back catalogue.

Well, it's an odd one. It's got lots of interesting noises and it's all very well put together - can you guess there's a "but" coming? I think if anyone else had handed this in as their homework, I’d be much nicer about it - but I just know that Charli can do much better and it feels like she could churn this out in her sleep.  Having said that, I did like "I Might Say Something Stupid" which has a definite Eilish feel to it and "Von Dutch" which has some nice 90s dance vibes to it. So it's not bad, it's just not as good as I was hoping for - I bet they spent waaaaay longer on that album cover than you'd guess though.

We're at #2 in the charts this week with a new entry and the rest of the top five are Taylor, Bon Jovi (another new entry - I wasn't going to check this out because I knew I'd hate it, but in the end I decided to give them a chance.  And I hated it), Billie and Eminem's best-of (undoubtedly because he's #1 in the singles chart). We have one more new entry in the top ten for Aurora (#8) - I suspected I'd like this and I did, with some great noises on it (even my eldest expressed her appreciation for some of the tracks!). I also checked out Meghan Traynor's new entry (#12) with very low expectations that it would be for me - so I wasn't in the least bit surprised at how much I hated that as well.

Last week I said that Becky would drop to #13 and I can report I got this hopelessly wrong because she's at #40 - it's been some time since I got one quite so wrong! I can't help but feel that a similar fate awaits Charli, so let's go for #40 for her as well. And this week's Taylor stats are an impressive three in the top ten, six in the top twenty and eleven in the entire chart - I suspect you can probably guess why that's happened. I also have to report some controversy because this week's race for the top looked to be between Charli and Bon Jovi until Taylor dropped some new versions of The Tortured Poets Department - she obviously needs the cash!

Wikipedia has a lot more on the album than I was expecting - including an unironic section on the album artwork which is considerably larger than a lot of entries for other albums. I was also not exactly surprised to see that seven people worked on "vocal engineering" on this album (whatever that is!). The critics absolutely loved the album - it's apparently the best rated album of the year. It's also done very well commercially getting to the top five in Australia, The Netherlands, Ireland and New Zealand. But the favourite thing I learned was that the deluxe version is called Brat And It's the Same But There's Three More Songs So It's Not...

"Customers also listened to" RAYE, Sabrina Carpenter, Meghan Traynor and Aurora  - maybe other people are listening to new entries as well! I'm a bit intrigued by this because of how much the critics loved it - I feel like I'm maybe missing something, but it's always possible the critics are just making it up as they go along.

07/06/24 - A fine "that sort of thing"
21/06/24 - Yeah, I didn't mind this

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