Can you feel anything at all? Are you dead inside?

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

21/06/15 : Drones - Muse


I've generally kept touch with Muse over the years, but for our fifth visit with the lads we've got an album I'm not aware I've ever even heard of so that doesn't exactly up my expectations - but let's see shall we?

Hmmm. It feels like a decent enough album on most levels, but not a particularly great Muse album - which is always a problem for groups that have churned out a load of albums with a decent amount of variety and a generally high quality bar. There was nothing wrong with it exactly (it's very reminiscent of Queen in a lot of places), but it's hard to see why I'd pick this above any of their albums that I already know and like (and the opinion of internet ranking sites is that this is either mid-ranking or right at the bottom of their output).

We're at #1 in the charts this week on their second week of a 24 week run, with it spending its first two weeks at the top. The rest of the top five were Florence, a Paul Simon best-of, James Taylor (another new entry - his last album of original tracks to chart here) and Ed Sheeran and there's one more new entry in the top ten for Adam Lambert (#8) - I have a sneaking suspicion this will be similarly bombastic to Muse's offering.

Wikipedia has way more on the album that I was expecting (244 milliPeppers) but it doesn't exactly tell us loads. It's their seventh album and was produced by Mutt Lange (probably best known for producing Come On Over). Apparently it's a concept album about a solider abandoning his role and then defecting (which completely passed me by), also covering "deep ecology, the empathy gap, and World War III" (of course it does) and is a return to "a more straightforward rock sound musically" (I'm not convinced about this either). The critics were mixed on it, liking some bits but not so much others but commercially it rocked selling over a million copies globally and getting to #1 in a load of countries, including the US where it took over from Florence - the first time two UK artists had debuted at #1 in consecutive weeks since 1956!

"Customers also listened to" Royal Blood, Nothing But Thieves, Foo Fighters and Biffy Clyro - all quality noise-makers if you like that kind of thing. Which I don't, generally - but I don't mind Muse and I didn't mind this, but there's also nothing there to draw me back to it either.

14/06/15 - Much better than I was expecting
28/06/15 - One I feel I should have liked more than I did

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