Street lights turn on one by one

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

02/10/15 : Caracal - Disclosure


I own Disclosure's debut album and seem to recall I liked it, but I've never heard this one - I've some reasonably high expectations for it.

Yeah, it's nice enough but maybe a bit too smoooooth - it feels like dance music you sit and nod your head along to rather than actually dancing to it. None of it's horrible, it's just a bit too safe. I did like "Molecules" though because it's got some nice groove and bass to it and "Nocturnal" definitely benefits from The Weeknd's vocals. And if you don't know what's on the album cover then shame on you - it's obviously a caracal (Latin name - Caracal Caracal).

We're at #1 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a ten week run - it very nearly dropped every week, but just spoiled the run in the final week with a small bounce. The rest of the top five were New Order (another new entry), David Gilmour, Chvrches (another new entry which I don't think I've heard) and Jess Glynne (STILL missing out) and we have one more new entry in the top ten for Don Henley (a surprisingly high #7, which is his best ever album chart placing in the UK).

Wikipedia has remarkable little on the album - like Rudimental it's their second effort and they too have an impressive selection of guest artists with The Weeknd, Sam Smith, Gregory Porter, Kwabs, Lorde and Nao all appearing here. Unlike Rudimental, there's a massive section on the critical reception where they were all mostly nice enough about it, but they also all seemed to find something different to complain about - but it did get nominated for a Grammy, so was received well enough. It also did surprisingly well commercially globally - #2 in Australia, #3 in Ireland and New Zealand and #9 in the US, amongst many other places.

"Customers also listened to" Sam Smith, Gorgon City, Jessie Ware and Diplo - most of whom I think I should know more about than I do, although I don't have a lot of time for Sam Smith on previous visits. I'd be interested to revisit Settle, their debut album because I remember liking it a lot more than I liked this - there's nothing wrong with it, but it's just not hitting the spot.

25/09/15 - Astonishingly successful, yet bang average
09/10/15 - Fine, but not quite attention grabbing

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