I've just stepped outside of a dream

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

10/08/03 : Magic And Medicine - The Coral 



Impressively and unexpectedly, this is our fourth visit with The Coral - they generally make an interesting, pleasant enough sound so I'm perfectly happy to see what we've got here.

Yeah, this is indeed an interesting, pleasant enough sound - some might find it a bit twee, but I can see there would be times it would just hit the spot for me, although it feels more of a summery sound than something to listen to with Storm Eowyn kicking off out there. I particularly liked "Liezah", "Secret Kiss", "Bill McCai" and "Pass It On" (which I remembered) but it was all a nice enough sound for me and something different from the usual fare, without really being something I feel I'm likely to search out again. It's also a surprisingly creepy album cover for a very non-creepy album.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on their second week of an eleven week run (featuring drops in all but the last week) with it having debuted at an impressive #1. The rest of the top five were Robbie Williams, Daniel Bedingfield, Beyoncé and Stereophonics with next highest new entry being a somewhat surprising Kraftwerk (#21).

Wikipedia has way more on the album than I was expecting (219 milliPeppers) which tells us it's their second album and was produced by Ian Broudie (from The Lightning Seeds). Apart from that, there's not a lot else there apart from a detailed track-by-track breakdown that no-one really needs. The critics were nice enough about it - although quite a few noted that it was more mature than their debut, but less fun as a result. Commercially, it did more across Europe than you might expect, without really breaking through anywhere except in Ireland where it got to #4. 

"Customers also listened to" Embrace, The Libertines, Doves and Coral (who's a female singer-songwriter who probably gets more streams than she expects as a result). I didn't mind this at all - it was nicely different from anything else we've seen this year and had some decent tracks on it. 

03/08/03 - Admirable rather than loveable
17/08/03 - Perplexingly popular

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