This hit, that ice cold Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

01/02/15 : Uptown Special - Mark Ronson


I obviously know "Uptown Funk" and think it's well done, if not exactly my thing. I'm expecting the rest of the album to be similar but not quite as good, soon getting tiresome.

I'm not far off, but I'd say the rest of it is still all well put together and there's little danger of it getting tiresome because it only lasts for 38 minutes. It is noteworthy for the appearance of Stevie Wonder because that man can improve anything, but apart from that and "Uptown Funk" it all went in one ear and out the other. I guess it's fine if you want a bit of funk/soul/R&B, but not really my thing.

We're at #3 on the chart this week on his second week of a twelve week run having debuted at #1, pretty much all of which must have been down to "Uptown Funk". The rest of the top five are Meghan (another new entry), Ed, Sam and George and we have two more new entries in the top ten for The Charlatans (#7 - one I've not listened to) and Rae Morris (#10).

Wikipedia has way more on the album than I was expecting (150 milliPeppers) and even having read it, I'm not entirely sure what they managed to say. It's his fourth album, his first since 2010 and there are approximately a million people involved in it. The critics were fulsome in their praise with hardly anyone having a bad word to say about it and lots of people having a load of nonsense to say about it, including The Daily Telegraph who said it was "somewhere between a chin-stroking jazz poetry recital and a riotous teenage disco" (spoiler alert - it isn't). 

Commercially, it was a peculiar one, doing very well in some places (#2 in Australia, #3 in Canada, #5 in the US), middling in others (#18 in France, #23 in Germany) and surprisingly poorly in others (#55 in Spain, #72 in Italy). It really had legs in the US though, selling over a million copies and getting to #27 in the year-end chart - which doesn't really surprise me because it's quite a US kinda sound.

"Customers also listened to" Bruno Mars, Julian Moon, Daniel Merriweather and Rhonda - a slightly strange mix and I feel that would please Mark Ronson because he's a man who likes a slightly strange mix of things. Which sometimes works out well and sometimes not so well - here's it's well put together and I think he can be proud of it, but it doesn't hit the spot for me.

25/01/15 - Better than I was expecting
01/02/15 - A most peculiar beast

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