Ring the alarm and I'm throwin' elbows

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

25/05/03 : Stripped - Christina Aguilera

Just two weeks after we met Justin and mentioned he toured his album with Xtina, we bump into the lady herself - I've never heard this, but I'm expecting to quite enjoy it.

It's not a million miles away from a female JT album in that it's been super-produced to push the buttons it feels it needs to, but I think this benefits from the greater variety across the album with "Dirrty", "Beautiful" and "Fighter" all being very decent tracks. However, I do have a suspicion there's actually too much variety because it all feels a bit scattergun and I really didn't need 20 tracks lasting 77 minutes - her voice does begin to grate somewhat after the hour mark.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on her 30th week of an impressive 84 week run and it's had subsequent runs of nine, five, three and eleven weeks - but it never made #1, peaking at #2 in its 19th week. The rest of the top five were Justin Timberlake, The White Stripes, Evanescence and Busted and the highest new entry was The Deftones (#7).

Wikipedia has a massive amount on the album (426 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is her fourth album and the one where she started to take control of her career, introducing us to Xtina, who's a bit of a dirrty girl. It wasn't a transition without its hiccups, but I think it's fair to say she managed it better than Britney did. The critics were very mixed on the album with even the good reviews thinking it was possibly a bit too much, but the bad ones really laid into it - "the sound of an artist who was given too much freedom too early and has no idea what to do with it", which sounds very catty to me.  Retrospective reviews have been much kinder, but it's always possible they were driven by the commercial performance with it selling 12 million copies globally, although it only made it to #1 in Argentina, but it did get to #2 in the US as well as here. Her entry tells me she's worth over $150 million these days, so I guess the control thing worked out OK for her - I also learned her voice goes into the whistle register, which I didn't even know was a thing so that was an interesting diversion!

"Customers also listened to" Britney, J Lo, P!nk and Kelly Clarkson - a collection of shrinking violets if ever I saw one. And Christina certainly came out of her shell somewhat around this time - the results are somewhat variable and definitely overlong, but when they're good, they're really pretty good.

01/06/03 - A good example of that sort of thing