All that I hope, is it just smoke and mirrors?

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

22/02/15 : Smoke + Mirrors - Imagine Dragons


Our second visit with them Dragons - last time I didn't mind it but didn't quite know what to do with it, so let's imagine we're gonna get the same here.

Yeah - that's pretty much where we are. It's kinda rocky-indie-pop (there's definitely a RHCP vibe to parts of it) - last time I said I thought it was probably best experienced live and I can really imagine that here as well. I certainly didn't hate it though - it's got a nice expansive sound to it and despite having all sorts on there, I thought it worked well as an album. I'm not sure I needed the 21 tracks and 80 minutes of the deluxe version, but I did like the album cover.

We're at #1 with a new entry in the chart this week (which surprised me) at the start of an equally surprising 31 week run. The rest of the top five are the ubiquitous Sam and Ed, a most peculiar Drake offering and a 25th anniversary best-of new entry from Texas (who are still hanging in there, having played the O2 last night) and we have one more new entry in the top ten for Thunder (#9).

Wikipedia has considerably more than I was expecting on the album (210 milliPeppers) and there's loads of snippets of content in there, most of which you're absolutely fine not knowing. It's their second album and was produced by Alex da Kid (who we met recently as a co-writer of this). Critically, the response was a bit mixed but I'm not entirely sure what people were complaining about eg The Washington Post said the band "is very good at what it does, even if what it does isn't very good" and I've no idea what that means. Commercially, it did pretty well getting to the top ten in a load of countries and #1 in Canada and the US as well as here.

"Customers also listened to" twenty one pilots, Fall Our Boy, Panic! At The Disco and The Score - none of which are really my sort of thing. And I'm not convinced Imagine Dragons are either, but I'm also not convinced they aren't - I feel I'd probably enjoy seeing them live, but there's no danger of me relistening to either of their albums I've experienced.

15/02/15 - Well done, but not exactly breaking boundaries
01/03/15 - Perfectly listenable

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