I was a king under your control

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

24/07/15 : Communion - Years & Years


I know Years & Years was originally a band featuring Olly Alexander and somehow transitioned into just being Olly Alexander but I've no idea where this album lives on that trajectory - I'm expecting it to be OK, but maybe a bit overwrought.

Hmmm - it's not overwrought and it's got a pretty decent synth-pop sound to it. But it's a bit lacking in variety across the album and it rarely even approaches the highs of "King", although I also liked "Ties", "Desire" and "Without" which is nicely slower. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's also not exactly a lot to get excited about either.

We're at #1 in the chart this week, somewhat surprisingly not with a new entry because it managed to hold on to it from the previous week at the start of a 67 week run, which was longer than I was expecting. The rest of the top five were Ed Sheeran, Tame Impala (a new entry), James Bay and Sam Smith - that's a top five of guys in touch with their sensitive sides, isn't it? It was a good week for the men with new entries for Andrea Faustini (#14 - an X Factor survivor), Nick Jonas (#16) and Jason Isbell (#17 - this is probably well worth checking out).

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album, but most of it details the singles released from the album telling us that things didn't really take off until "King" was released as the fourth single - it surprised me they took so long to release the obvious stand-out track but maybe it was a cunning marketing ploy. The critics were somehow both nice and a bit mean about it - apparently they "felt there was derivativeness throughout the songs", which did make me wonder exactly what they were expecting. Commercially, it did well across Europe getting into the top ten in quite a few countries, including #1 in Italy but it only got to #47 in the US - it feels like it could quite easily have done better than that over there.

"Customers also listened to" Olly Alexander (quelle surprise!), Jess Glynne, Clean Bandit and Sigala and they're all definitely in the same ballpark. And they all make "fine" music but it's not really something I can get excited about, unless they somehow manage to put the pieces together perfectly, like they manage on "King".

17/07/15 - Not bad at all
31/07/15 - Interesting if not their absolute best

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