How can you see into my eyes like open doors?

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

06/07/03 : Fallen - Evanescence 

Well, I liked the single "Bring Me To Life" but I've never heard the rest of the album - my suspicion is that it won't be terrible but also quite obviously not as catchy as that song.

Yeah, that's pretty much where we are, but I'd upgrade the rest of the album from "not terrible" to at least "generally passable" and in some cases "actually quite good". There was more variety across the rest of the tracks than I was expecting, but it's not like any of them resulted in major surprises. "Bring Me To Life" does stand out from the crowd, but the rest of it does at least try to go up against it and really doesn't disgrace itself. I doubt I'll ever listen to it again, but I liked the general sound and I'm pleased I caught up with it.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on their tenth week of a huge 71 week run with it peaking at #1 in its eighth week - it's spent another twelve weeks in the charts over the years with it last being seen for a single week in '15. The rest of the top five were Beyoncé, Delta Goodrem (a new entry), The Thrills (another new entry) and Ashanti (and another one!) with yet further new entries for Morcheeba (#6) and Electrix Six (#7).

Wikipedia has a massive amount on the album (467 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's their debut album and the only one that features their original line-up of Amy Lee and Ben Moody, who met all the way back in '94 when they were young teenagers. It sounds like they found the writing process quite stressful, particularly with all the "helpful" suggestions from the record company, but they fought hard for their vision. The critics were very nice about it, getting past their sniffiness about "the genre now too old to be called nu-metal" by pointing out all the things that made it different/better - "nu-metal gets a powdering of Andrew Lloyd Webber theatrics". Commercially, it did quite well, I guess - getting to #1 in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland and Portugal as well as here. Surprisingly, it only got to #3 in the US but it's sold over ten million copies there, and seventeen million globally. 

"Customers also listened to" Linkin Park (no surprises there), We Are The Fallen, Within Temptation and Avril Lavigne - I assume the others are nu-metal, but I can also see the link to Avril. I liked this - it was something a bit different and was put together pretty well, with more variety than I was expecting. 

29/06/03 - One that missed the spot for me
13/07/03 - An enjoyable revisit for one I'd completely forgotten about