I drew a broken heart right on your window pane

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

11/01/15 : Never Been Better - Olly Murs


Well, it's been a long time but we've finally got to another album "we" own - in this case, the owner was our youngest who went through a massive Olly phase around this time, so I'm actually a bit of a connoisseur of Mr Murs's music. Having said that, the only one of his we ever listen to these days is Right Place, Right Time (which is surprisingly decent) so I've got no idea what's on this one.

Funnily enough, this isn't his Scandi death metal offering - if you know Olly's stuff, then nothing here will surprise you. There are decent tunes which are sung well enough and some variety, but not enough to frighten the horses. It does have a few particularly decent tracks on it though - "Wrapped Up", which always reminds me of Shalamar, "Up", which is probably one of my favourites of his and "Let Me In", which is a nice closer. There's nothing here to convert anyone, but if you had a youngster who loved Olly then it was an absolutely essential purchase.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on his sixth week of a 36 week run having debuted at #1 and it managed another fourteen week run in '16 as well, so it did OK for itself. The rest of the top five were Sam, Ed, George and Taylor and there were no new entries in the entire chart this week - early January never being a popular time for putting new things out there.

Wikipedia doesn't have loads on the album - it's his fourth album and there were a lot of people involved in putting it together. Including Paul Weller, which was a name I wasn't expecting to see - he co-wrote "Let Me In". The critics were pretty mixed, but the guy from Trucking (yes, a magazine about trucks and driving them) REALLY didn't like it - I do hope that truckers weren't Olly's target audience. Despite Trucking's best efforts, it did well enough commercially, getting to #7 in Ireland and a surprisingly high #42 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" The Vamps (who I'm off to see later in the month), Take That (who I'm not off to see any time ever, but I'd still rather see than Oasis), Union J and JLS. This is a perfectly listenable album with more high spots than you might expect - I do have a soft spot for him because of the amount of time I've been forced to listen to him, but he also seems like a decent guy and there's really nothing wrong with this.

04/01/15 - Better than expected
18/01/15 - Perplexingly popular 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more