Who'd believe with the way things are here?

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

30/10/94 : Youthanasia - Megadeth


Lordy that's a contrived title but whatever it means (surely it's not literal?), I'm very much not expecting to like it.

Well, I don't like it - but it was a lot more bearable than I was expecting. It's just hard rock with some very decent guitar playing involved which doesn't get too grating, so that was a pleasant surprise. However, on first listen, to my uncultured ears, the songs all sound exactly the same - I did notice some were slower, but they could quite easily have been the same song just slowed down. So I just got bored with the whole thing I'm afraid - feel free to tell me I'm wrong, but I can assure you I don't care :-) The album cover reminds me of Teletubbies, but I'm not sure that's quite the effect they were after.

We're at #6 with a new entry in the chart this week on the start of a brief four week run with this being as high as it got, although it did come back for two more weeks in '95. The top five this week were a Bon Jovi best-of, Madonna (a new entry), a Chris Rea best-of (another new entry), R.E.M. and a Cyndy Lauper best-of and the next highest new entry was Dodgy (#43). 

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album (169 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is their sixth album and amusingly, "Youthanasia was not a large stylistic departure from the band's earlier recordings". Most of the entry spends its time telling us that "youthanasia" is a clever wordplay on "youth" and "euthanasia" (get it?) but fortunately they're not actually advocating child murder - it's more to do with the lack of opportunities for young people. The critical reviews were pretty positive but it did very well commercially getting to #4 in the US and selling a million copies over there. Somewhat surprisingly, it only got to #2 in Finland - Megadeth feel right up their street but they've only had one #1 album over there which was their '23 offering (yup, they're still going!).

discogs.com tells us you're going to have to spend a crisp fiver to get a decent version of this but you can chuck £25 at a Japanese CD version if you really feel the need. I'm sure those that love this absolutely love it but I'm afraid there's no danger of me getting there - but I will concede that I found it considerably more bearable than I was expecting.

23/10/94 - Too noodly for me
06/11/94 - Considerably better than the album cover suggests

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