I've been made blue, I've been lied to

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

08/01/61 : The Fabulous Style Of The Everly Brothers - The Everly Brothers

That's quite the album title and cover, isn't it? It appears the style they've gone for is "casual undertaker"...

For a best-of, an awful lot of this album is completely unknown to me - with "When Will I Be Loved?" being the only track I recognised their version of. I obviously also know "Be Bop A Lula", but no-one needs The Everly's version (it occurred to me I had no idea who first recorded it - ten points if you know). The rest of it is all perfectly fine, but feels very inessential.

We're at #9 in the charts this week on their last week of a two week run, but it did manage a seven week run in '60 with it peaking at #4. The top five this week were Elvis, South Pacific, Cliff, George and Peter & Sophia and we have one new entry in the chart for Bob Luman (#18) who was apparently a country and rockabilly star.

Wikipedia doesn't have anything on the album because it's a best-of - their second best-of album out of, somewhat bizarrely, a total of four albums they'd made at this point.  Huh?!? To be fair to them, they had released quite a few singles, but I took a look at a list of their singles and it appears the only other ones I know are "Wake Up Little Susie" and "Cathy's Clown" (which came later) - I guess I'm just not an Everlys expert.

"Customers also listened to" a million other Everly Brothers albums. Fine I guess - but having done two this year, I personally feel I've heard enough of the lads for the rest of my life. It sounds nice, but it all gets very samey very quickly. 

And you get ten points if you knew that Gene Vincent wrote "Be Bop A Lula" but you get a further ten points if you knew it was first recorded by Gene Vincent And His Blue Caps - I feel those extra points are quite safe.

01/01/61 - A fine way to end the year
15/01/61 - A nice voice, but some odd tracks


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