Did I drink too much? Am I losing touch?

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

05/07/15 : How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful - Florence + The Machine

Well this an interesting week - have you spotted why? (don't worry - you won't have!). Look at the date - it's my birthday!! No, that's not it - if you compare the dates between this entry and the last, you can see there's only five days difference. This means that this was the last Sunday chart, so this would have been the last time you could have been driving back from your weekend visit to your grandma and begging your parents to let you put the charts on! I'm sure there's a good reason it was moved to Friday, but it still feels wrong to me, I'm afraid - particularly when I'm driving back from somewhere on a Sunday night.

As for this album, I seem to recall I listened to it at the time, quite liked it and so have, quite obviously, never revisited it once in all the intervening years (which I believe is probably true for all her/their albums except for Lungs). So it will be interesting to see what I think of it...

Yeah, I liked it. The opening track "Ship To Wreck" is a strong one and I also liked "Hiding", but the overall quality bar is pretty high here, with a decent amount of variety across the album. You do have to be in the mood for her voice, which I can appreciate may not be to everyone's taste - but I enjoyed it throughout. She's a bit creepy on the album cover though (and she doesn't mention The Machine).

This week we're at #2 on her/their fifth week of a 41 week run, with it having spent its first and fourth weeks at #1. The rest of the top five were a Lionel Richie and The Commodores best-of (a re-entry for a release from '03 for a reason that will be lost in the mists of time), James Bay, Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran and the highest new entry was Richard Thompson (#10) - somewhat surprisingly his highest solo chart position across EIGHTEEN charting albums he's had between '85 and '24 (his only charting album with Linda was a best-of many years after they'd stopped recording together).

Wikipedia has a massive amount on the album (303 milliPeppers) - having read it, I'm not entirely sure what they padded it out with. Basically, she had a bit of a wobble before recording this and so quite a lot of that went into this - she was also determined to make it different from Ceremonials, her previous album. The critics were generally very taken with it - it appeared on a load of year-end lists and was also nominated for the Mercury Music Prize (losing out to Benjamin Clementine, obviously). Commercially it did pretty well I guess because it also got to #1 in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland and the US (it did very well in English speaking countries, didn't it?). It's also intriguing exactly how many musicians are on this album - I can't imagine there are too many others I've reviewed with four French horn players on them! Or even one piccolo trumpet player...

"Customers also listened to" Of Monsters And Men. Hozier, Bastille and London Grammar - I can see the general vibe tying in there. But there's really only one Florence and she's kept the bar high over the years - it's just a bit of a shame for her that I'll probably still only think of Lungs if I'm looking for one of her/their albums.

28/06/15 - One I feel I should have liked more than I did
10/07/15 - Something a bit different