What's worth nothing else but love

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

30/03/03 : Home - Simply Red


Our fourth visit with the lads and so far their offerings have been a mix of bad, bland and surprisingly enjoyable - looking at their timeline, it seems like bland is the mostly probably outcome here.

Actually, it's much closer to surprisingly enjoyable - there's a lot more variety here than I was expecting and some nice surprises. "Sunrise" samples Hall & Oates' "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" and it's nicely done, even it it really made me want to stop the album and play that instead. I also wasn't expecting to hear them cover "You Make Me Feel Brand New" (originally by The Stylistics) but I have to admit they do it well. Don't get me wrong, no-one needs any of this in their lives but there's far worse musical wallpaper out there.

We're at #2 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a 23 week run (with this being as high as it got) - it also managed further runs of thirteen and four weeks, so people couldn't get enough of Mick and the boys! The rest of the top five were Linkin Park (another new entry), Norah Jones, Celine Dion (another new entry) and Daniel O'Donnell - what a peculiar mix! And the next highest new entry is Placebo (#11).

Wikipedia tells us this is their eighth album and also informs me that "Positively 4th Street" and "Money in My Pocket" are also covers, having originally been done by Bob Dylan and Dennis Brown respectively. The critics were generally pretty "meh" about it, but Uncut absolutely hated it, giving it half a star out of five - I'm intrigued as to what they found to hate so much about it. Commercially, it did way better than I imagined, getting to #2 in The Netherlands and #1 in Italy, but only #187 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" Sly & Robbie, M People, Sade and Seal - all there or thereabouts, without being all that similar. This certainly isn't top-notch Simply Red, but it's got some nice sounds on it and is perfectly listenable - high praise indeed.

23/03/03 - Not a good album
06/04/03 - Absolutely zero evolution

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