When you nod your head yes, but you wanna say no

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

11/12/15 : Purpose - Justin Bieber

Adele, Coldplay and now Bieber - no-one could accuse us of starting 2015 in a low-key fashion, could they? I'm expecting this to be quite rubbish, but because he had grown up (a bit) by then I'm expecting it to be at least bearable (unlike a previous visit).

To be fair to the lad, this is more than bearable in places - I'd even go as far as saying I like "What Do You Mean?" and "Sorry".  And most of the rest of the tracks really aren't bad - I still find his voice quite annoying, but he's definitely playing to his strengths here. I accidentally listened to the deluxe version which was 64 minutes long and that did make it all feel a bit samey by the end - but I have to admit I didn't hate it (and probably preferred it to Coldplay), which is a considerable step up for the lad.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on his fourth week of a - wait for it - 105 week run, but despite spending his first twenty weeks in the top five, he never made the top spot peaking at #2 in his first and 19th week. He certainly came up against some pretty heavyweight competition, with the rest of the top five being Adele, Coldplay (a new entry), Elvis and Jess Glynne and the next highest new entry was Fleur East (#14, fresh from an impressive X Factor run.

Wikipedia has a frankly unbelievable 566 milliPeppers on the album - there was no danger of me bothering to read all of it, I can assure you. Once again, we have quite the guest artist list - Skrillex, Big Sean, Travis Scott, Halsey, Diplo, Ariana Grande and Nas are all involved to some degree or other. The critics were mostly pretty nice about it, but The Consequence Of Sound made me laugh with "even when Bieber hits mediocre, he reaches it by stumbling headfirst down a cliff".  Commercially, it was a battle between Bieber and One Direction (coming soon) - unsurprisingly 1D won in the UK, but Justin won in the US (but both of them did OK out of it). A bizarre fact that jumps out is how well this album did in Denmark - it was the best selling album of 2016 and has appeared on every year-end list since.

"Customers also listened to" Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Charlie Puth and Shawn Mendes - definitely all in the same ball-park there. I wouldn't go as far as saying I loved this, but there were certainly bits of it I enjoyed - wonders will never cease.

04/12/15 - Not bad at all
18/12/15 - I don't get this

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