Respect the fact me and Kone opening some doors

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

10/07/15 : The Long Way Home - Krept & Konan


Well this is a bit different from anything else we've seen recently - I vaguely remember Krept & Konan as hippy-hop types but I had absolutely no idea they've been as successful as this. If I'm being honest, my expectations aren't exactly sky high but I'm happy to be proved wrong.

Hmmm - I can't say I loved it, but it's well put together with some decent beats on it. Maybe they play with the vocoders a bit too often and I'm not sure why Konan's mum gets a track, but I guess it mixes things up a bit. I'm not really aware of the timeline of UK hip-hop, but it feels like quite a few people in the charts now would have been listening to this growing up and it hasn't dated, so I'm guessing it's been pretty influential. But hey, I could be totally wrong on this - the chances are that if you like this kind of thing you are already aware of it and if you don't then you're absolutely fine as you are. I didn't need 67 minutes of it though (or 84 minutes on the deluxe version).

We're at #2 in the chart this week with a new entry on the start of a seven week run which pleasingly featured a drop every week. The rest of the top five were Ed Sheeran, a Lionel Richie and The Commodores best-of, James Bay and Taylor Swift and we have two more new entries in the top ten for two English singer-songwriters who I know nothing about - Saint Raymond (#8) and Lucy Rose (#9).

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album but there's a surprising list of guest artists on the album - Emeli Sandé, Ed Sheeran, Rick Ross, Wiz Khalifa and Skepta along with others I've never heard of. And that's pretty much it - there's no word on critical response and commercially it didn't appear to do anything away from here.

"Customers also listened to" Spice, Jah Cure, Chip and Mostack - ah yes, I'm very much in uncharted territory here! I didn't mind this at all though and it was nice to have something different - Dre is only thing we've had in '15 which is similar and this felt a lot more relatable to me (without claiming I'm in the slightest bit down in the hood).

05/07/15 - Yeah, I like this
17/07/15 - Not bad at all

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