I'll show you sweet mellow days that you want and need

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

24/01/88 : Come Into My Life - Joyce Sims

I think I vaguely remember the single, but that's all I've got for this - I'm assuming she's an American R&B/soul singer but who actually knows...

Yeah - definitely R&B. Now, I'm not saying she loved the title track, but not only does it open the album but it also goes on for 7:49 and there's absolutely not the content there to support that sort of thing. And this very much continues - there are only two tracks (out of eight, one of which is a remix) that run less than five minutes. It's not my sort of thing but none of it seems dreadful, however I do think it is pretty average and it all totally outstays its welcome - I've just no idea what she was thinking. It also sounds amusingly dated these days with the drum machine effects she chose - and I think it's also fair to say the album cover is of its time.

We're at #8 in the chart this week on her fourth week of a surprisingly length 24 week run, with it peaking at #5 in its sixth week. The top five this week were Terence Trent D'Arby (starting an eight week run at the top), Johnny Hates Jazz, The Pogues (a new entry), The Christians and Wet Wet Wet with the next highest new entry being Dusty Springfield (#31).

Wikipedia tells us this is her debut album and that's pretty much your lot other than telling us that "Love Makes A Woman" was a cover of a Barbara Acklin song, who was a US soul singer in the 60s and 70s. Looking at Joyce's entry to pad things out there's not a lot in there - this was pretty much it for the lass (somewhat unsurprisingly, both her greatest hits albums are called Come Into My Life) but she kept recording until '14 and she died relatively young in '22.  The only word on critical response is an 8/10 score from NME (which surprised me) and commercially it only really did anything here, only making the R&B chart over in the US - it's weird how we sometimes picked up on US artists more than they did.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for a couple of quid but if you've got too much money there is a version there for £40 which looks to be exactly the same. I struggle to imagine the demand for Joyce is too high these days - it feels like she had her time and this album very much belongs there (and I wouldn't have listened to it then either).

17/01/88 - Well done but it didn't grab me
31/01/88 - A very decent album