Your fragile face reflects years of neglect

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

25/09/88 : Staring At The Sun - Level 42


Our second visit with Level 42 (and I'd completely forgotten the previous one) and our fourth album that "we" own this year - I reckon it's gonna be an enjoyable enough visit.

Yeah, I think it just about sneaks into "enjoyable enough". The main problem is that it just doesn't have a "Running In The Family" or "Hot Water" on it -  I just about remembered "Heaven In My Hand" and I quite liked "Two Hearts Collide", but it's safe to say this isn't peak Level 42. There are also one or two tracks that left me thinking "well, that wasn't great", but overall I think the sound is pretty much what you'd expect from an average pop/funk fusion band - Level 42 just made things difficult for themselves by punching well above their weight at times. I'm also not sure how many people need the 150 minute expanded version though.

We're at #2 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a nine week run, with this being as high as it got (also in its second week as well). The rest of the top five were Bon Jovi (a new entry), Rap Trax, Womack & Womack (which looks like it's going to be unlucky) and the Hot City Nights compilation (and a most peculiar mix it is, but actually not a bad one) and the next highest new entry was The Cocteau Twins (#15).

Wikipedia tells us this is their eighth album, features a new line-up because Phil and Boon Gould had left the band and it wasn't as successful as the previous ones - and that's your lot! Looking at their entry, this was the start of a period of churn for the band in terms of line-up. They kept it going for a couple more albums before deciding they'd had enough of each other - but they accepted their fate in the 2010s and reformed playing the fan favourites and they're still at it, being on tour as we speak. Critical reception for this album wasn't great (only two stars from Smash Hits) but commercially it still did pretty well in Europe, getting to #5 in Norway and #1 in The Netherlands.

I suspect there aren't fortunes to made on discogs.com with this one - you can pick up a CD or cassette version for a quid, but you're going to have to spend £3 on a vinyl copy. There's a double CD version up for £99, but I suspect they're just trying it on because no-one's going to spend that, are they? If you like the Level 42 sound (as the lovely Mrs Reed does) then this is perfectly fine, but more casual listeners will be fine sticking to their best-of.

18/09/88 - An utterly lovely album
02/10/88 - Pushing the buttons it aims for

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