Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

16/10/15 : X - Ed Sheeran



Well, obviously I've heard this, haven't I? Haven't I? Oh, somewhat to my surprise, it appears I haven't - and we don't own it either.

Hmmm - it's certainly the start of his musical magpie journey with there being all sorts on there, and (unsurprisingly) it works better for in some places than in others. I prefer the classic Ed sound of "Photograph" and "Thinking Out Loud", but I also like some of the interesting noises he makes on "Bloodstream". The rappy stuff really doesn't work for me though, with "The Man" being particularly offensive. I'm happy for him to try stuff though and I think it's fair to say it hasn't done him any harm - I have to say I'm not completely sure why everyone went quite so mad for the album, but where it works, it works well.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on his 69th week of an impressive 336 week (5.5 years) run which featured thirteen weeks at #1, including an eight run to kick things off. He's currently up to 442 weeks in the chart in total and is still picking up the odd few weeks every so often, including this very week when he's at #93. The rest of the top five were a Faithless best-of (a new entry), Jess Glynne, The Game (another new entry) and John Grant (another new entry which I've somehow never heard) and the next highest new entries are Selena Gomez (#11) and Hurts (#12 - I really like this album).

Wikipedia has a bit on the album (465 milliPeppers) - I couldn't be bothered to read all the detail, but I did learn that Rick Rubin produced half the album and that "Don't" is about Ellie Goulding. The critics were nicer about the album than I was expecting but they could have said anything and it wouldn't have made any difference to the commercial performance - it was MASSIVE. It was released in June '14 and was the biggest selling album of the year here, shifting 1.7 million copies - and it was still #2 in the '15 year-end chart. It got to #1 in too many countries to list, including the US - where it was also #2 in the '15 year-end chart as well.

"Customers also listened to" Shawn Mendes, Maroon 5, Charlie Puth and Adele - which seems a slightly odd mix, but let's face it everyone listens to Ed because you just can't avoid him. I didn't mind this, but I really don't quite see what made people go quite so mad for it.

09/10/15 - Fine, but not quite attention grabbing
23/10/15 - I wasn't expecting that

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