I'm a brave man running through the rain

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

31/05/15 : 85% Proof - Will Young


Our third official visit with Mr Young, although I did listen to his latest album just last week as one of the new chart entries - he's been around a few years now, hasn't he? I'm expecting this to be bearable, if not exactly earth shattering.

And yeah, that's where we are. It's all generally fine, maybe a bit whiny and/or wet at times but a million miles better than Simply Red's tortuous offering. There's no denying he has a great voice - I didn't get a stand-out track here to bring in any new fans, but I'm sure the existing ones lapped it up. And that's all I've got to say about it really!

We're at #1 with a new entry in the chart this week on the start of an impressive nineteen week run - it's his last album that notched up a decent number of weeks in the chart, but the landscape has somewhat changed over the years. The rest of the top five were The Vaccines (another new entry), Taylor, Mumford & Sons and Sam Smith and we have one more new entry in the top ten for ASAP Rocky (#10).

Wikipedia has considerably more than I was expecting on the album (106 milliPeppers) which tells us remarkably little. This is his sixth album after a four year break, during which he did some musical theatre work (including showing his arse to my wife in Cabaret, which she might have mentioned a few times) and taught music at his old school. The critics were surprisingly nice about it, but I can't help but feel I side more with The Evening Standard who said "I'm sure he's a lovely guy and everything, but this is terribly dull" (although that's a bit harsh). Commercially, it got to #38 in Ireland but that was it away from these shores - he's never really transferred across to Europe (and certainly not to the US).

"Customers also listened to" Gareth Gates (they still can't escape each other), Joe McElderry, Shayne Ward and Delta Goodrem - I think it's safe to say Will is a class above the rest of them. I've got a lot of time for him and think he's done some fine tracks in his time, but I don't really hear any of that here.

24/05/15 - Fine, but unnecessary
07/06/15 - Very, very not good

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