Human/not human

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

16/10/88 : Revolutions - Jean-Michel Jarre

Our fourth visit with JMJ and he was doing well at improving my opinion of him until the last album which I did not enjoy, so he's almost back at square one - the only way is up, I guess...

Hmmm. At first I thought it was a bit of an improvement because he uses some more industrial sounds on the first four "Industrial Revolution" tracks and there are some interesting robot noises on "Revolution, Revolutions". But he then uses some animal noises and kids voices on later tracks which just made me think he'd discovered samplers and was just mucking about with them. The whole thing sounds like something that AI could chuck out in seconds these days, but I suspect it still probably didn't sound all that impressive in '88 - I thought it was all way less impressive than the stuff that Gary Numan was doing nine years earlier.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on his third week of a nine week run, with it having peaked at #2 in its second week. The rest of the top five are all new entries from U2, Pet Shop Boys, The Pasadenas and a Bananarama best-of - and they're followed by Chris de Burgh and Kylie and it's mad that six of the top seven from 37 years ago are still active, although to varying degrees. And the next highest new entry are Bomb The Bass (#18) who, somewhat surprisingly, kept going until '13.

Wikipedia tells us it's his ninth album and there's very little else there except for the fact that most of it is done on a Roland D-50 and "London Kid" features Hank Marvin. The Destination Docklands concerts in London were part of the promotion and they sound like a big thing with 100,000 people attending on each of two nights, but I really don't remember them at all. The only critical comment was from AllMusic, who were not impressed - but commercially it seems to have done OK although there's no word on how it did in France, which seems odd because surely it got to #1?

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for anything from 1 to 47 quid - with no obvious explanation for the price difference. There's no danger of me buying this though - it just felt very average and pretty lazy.

09/10/88 - Lacking in variety
23/10/88 - Neither hateful nor required