I love when you smell like your car

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

24/01/25 : Balloonerism - Mac Miller

Our second posthumous visit with Mr Miller - last time, I found it to be an interesting and different sound, if not exactly something I loved (and I've never listened to it again). It feels kinda weird that we're back five years later because you have to wonder exactly who has been spending so much time on it, but I'm interested to hear it.

As much as I remember, the sound is similar - last time I struggled to describe it, but the phrase that I came up with here was "psychedelic jazz hip-hop", which I suspect would be more than enough to scare me off normally. But I didn't mind it at all and there were some interesting lyrics in there - as much as I could understand them anyway because it's a bit mumbly at times. I'm not all that sure how many people would claim they love this, but it doesn't feel like the lazy rip-off that quite a few of these hip-hop posthumous efforts do.

We're down at #16 with a new entry in the charts this week and the top five are Robbie Williams (a new entry, which is somewhat surprisingly our first of the year - more on this in a bit), Sabrina, Gracie Abrams (up from #14 last week), SZA (her fifth consecutive week in the top five) and The Weeknd. Robbie's new entry is the soundtrack to Better Man (which has got surprisingly good critical reviews) and does feature a couple of original tracks, but is mostly rerecorded or remixed hits - some have had some quite interesting stuff done to them but some have most definitely not been improved. The only other new entry in the entire chart is David Gray (#25) - I guess it's fine but there's nothing there which is going to outshine White Ladder.

Last week I said that Franz Ferdinand would drop to #47 and I got that wrong because they dropped out of the chart altogether, which seems like a bit of a shame because it deserved better than that - the album charts are just so broken at the minute. I think Mac is going to hang in there, but not by much so I'm going for #78 and this week's Taylor stats are one in the top twenty, two in the top forty, six in the top fifty and seven in the entire chart - she's in danger of only having six in the chart next week!

Wikipedia tells us this is his seventh studio and second posthumous album, having been recorded in '14 and available unofficially for years. The album features Thundercat, SZA and, obviously, Delusional Thomas (Mac MIller's alter-ego) and was reasonably well received by the critics. Commercially, it's done better in quite a few places than it's managed here - #3 in The Netherlands, New Zealand and the US and a mighty #1 in Belgium.

"Customers also listened to" Busta Rhymes, Big Sean, Logic and Larry Lovestein & The Velvet Revival - who are not a selection I can tell you much about. But it's not like I can tell you much about Mac Miller either, but I do prefer him to many of this ilk because he was trying something different, even if I couldn't exactly claim I love him.

17/01/25 - Not bad at all
31/01/25 - Certainly not entirely without merit