You may have won this war we're fighting but would you tolerate the peace?

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

05/10/03 : Sacred Love - Sting

I very much like Sting's earlier solo stuff, but somewhere between then and now my interest tailed off because I'm not sure I was even aware this existed. I'm expecting it either to be tolerable or dreadful - interestingly, the thought it might be good has barely crossed my mind.

Well, the good news is that it isn't dreadful - I'd go as far as saying it's good in places, particularly on "Whenever I Say Your Name" where he duets with Mary J. Blige with their voices working well together and "This War" where he rocks out a bit. But a lot of the tracks are far too long (six of them are over five minutes long) and it's all a bit of a mish-mash with various styles dabbled in across the album, so it doesn't really hang together for me. The other problem is that the classic Sting sounding tracks just aren't as good as his earlier efforts, which just makes you think "what's the point?". So yeah, tolerable.

We're at #7 in the charts this week on his 2nd week of a fourteen week run with it having peaked at #3 in its debut week. The top five this week were Dido (a new entry, about to start a run of four weeks at the top and 17 weeks in the top three, with TEN at #1), Robbie Williams (another new entry), The Darkness, R Kelly and Muse and the next highest new entry was Rachel Stevens (#9). 

Wikipedia tells us this is his seventh solo album (he's up to fifteen now) and he tried a few new things on it with some of his mates including Mary and Anoushka Shankar. There's also a most peculiar section that lists all the remix versions of various tracks - including TEN versions of "Stolen Car". The critics were nice enough about it without going overboard, but it did surprisingly well globally getting to #1 in the curious combination of Denmark, Italy, Poland and Switzerland and even #3 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" The Police (who knew?), Sarah McLachlan, Seal and Peter Gabriel - there are some nice enough sounds out of that lot. As there have been plenty of times from Mr Sting in the past, but it all feels like diminishing returns and I can't imagine me ever revisiting this.

28/09/03 - Not something I need in my life
12/10/03 - Glad I caught up with this