Your glowing aura shows glistening eyes aglow

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

07/06/15 : Big Love - Simply Red

Well, I wasn't expecting to see these guys in 2015, I can tell you. It's safe to say my expectations aren't sky high for it, but I'm also not expecting it to be dreadful.

Oh dear - the first song is pretty bad. Some of them are a bit better but it's all very MoR soft-rock nonsense - and Mick's voice is surprisingly ropey in places (which also being very smooth in other places). All in all, this is not a good album - it was a real struggle to finish and involved quite a lot of skipping to the next track.

We're at #4 with a new entry in the chart this week on the start of a nine week run - not dreadful, but not quite the 101 week run that Stars managed. The rest of the top five were Florence, Collabro, Jamie XX (all new entries) and Taylor with the next highest new entry being Slaves (#8) who we met very recently in their latest incarnation. And I can confidently state that I'd much rather have listened to Collabro or Slaves - and that's saying something.

Wikipedia tells us this is their eleventh album (out of thirteen so far), their first in eight years and their first to feature original material in twenty! Why did they bother? Ah, it appears a 30th anniversary tour could well have been the reason. The critical reception was actually surprisingly generous - "the songs are smooth and sentimental, like easy-listening epitaphs" apparently. Commercially it went down pretty well in Europe - #2 in The Netherlands and #6 in Germany, but only #122 in France.

"Customers also listened to" M People, Sly & Robbie, The Lighthouse Family and Wet Wet Wet - no huge surprises there, methinks! And I accept that there's a time and a place for such music and even I find myself liking some of it. But none of that applies to this album which is just horrible.

31/05/15 - Fine but won't convert anyone
14/06/15 - Much better than I was expecting