He was a boy, she was a girl - can I make it any more obvious?

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

13/04/03 : Let Go - Avril Lavigne


I never listened to this because I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like it - but I do have a soft spot for "Sk8ter Boi" which I believe is on this album. So maybe I won't hate it (but I bet I do).

Nah - this is actually OK. It's not aimed at me in the slightest but there's nothing wrong with it - yes, it's a bit "oooh, I'm such a rebel" in places, but there's enough variety across the album that it doesn't get tiresome. "Sk8ter Boi" really pushes all the buttons it aims to and, along with "Complicated" stands out form the pack for me, but none of it is dreadful, She's definitely been listening to her Alanis Morrissette and P!nk albums - but there are far worse people she could have borrowed from. It's also a very well put together album cover for its market.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on her 33rd week of an impressive 65 week run, with it having got to #1 in its 19th-21st weeks. Which just all seems somewhat generous - and it had another 16 week run in '04! The rest of the top five were The White Stripes (it's mad it made it to #1!), Coldplay, Norah Jones and Simply Red (oh good, I'm going to get to listen to them again) and the highest new entry was The Lighthouse Family best-of (#9). 

Wikipedia has an impressive amount on the album (333 milliPeppers) and boy is there a load of old bollocks in there - apparently the album "transformed the pop-punk music scene" although I will let them have "contributing to the rise of female-fronted pop-punk music acts". The rest of the entry basically tells us she wrote it (along with her production team, but she has a credit on all songs), recorded it and released it. The critics were nice enough about it, but some expressed doubts about the simplicity of the lyrics - were they expecting Solzhenitsyn? Somewhat surprisingly, the album was nominated for five Grammy awards - less surprisingly, it did well at the MTV Music awards. Commercially, it did very well globally getting to #1 in Canada (of course), Australia, Ireland and New Zealand and #2 in the US, selling 16 million units globally.

"Customers also listened to" Michelle Branch, Hilary Duff, Ashlee Simpson and Kelly Clarkson - not a group i know a lot about, and I'm perfectly fine with that. But I do have to admit that a whole album of Avril was considerably more bearable than I was expecting though!

06/04/03 - Absolutely zero evolution
20/04/03 - Nice, but...

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