With my mind messed up, jumped in my car

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

24/04/94 : Toni Braxton - Toni Braxton


I remember the lass having a decent enough voice but that's all I've got on this one - I'm expecting it to be perfectly bearable but not for me.

I remembered "Another Sad Love Song" and "Breathe Again" - they were the opening tracks and probably the best ones for me, but the rest of them were all pretty decent and she does indeed have a nice voice. However, I generally find a whole album of R&B to be a bit too much and my interest was definitely flagging towards the end - but if you like this kind of thing then there's certainly far worse examples out there and it's also not something we've seen too much of this year. The album cover is amusingly of its time though

We're at #4 in the charts this week on her fourteenth week of an impressive 33 week run with this being as high as it got - this and the following week were the only weeks it spent in the top ten, so I guess a single was responsible. The rest of the top five were Pink Floyd, Deacon Blue, a Marvin Gaye best-of and Roxette with three new entries in the top ten for Van Morrison (#8), Pulp (#9 - His'n'Hers, which is a very decent album) and, quite obviously, Jimi Hendrix (#10). 

Wikipedia has a decent amount on the album (140 milliPeppers) but it tells us remarkably little. Originally, she was part of The Braxtons with her sisters (who are amusingly called Traci, Towanda, Trina and Tamar) and they released a single which did nothing other than bring Toni to the attention of the record producer Babyface. Critically, the reviews generally praised Toni whilst being a bit "meh" about the songs (I thought they were OK, actually). She did win three Grammy awards on the back of it, but I suspect the commercial success might have had something to do with that because this really took off in the US, getting to #1 and selling over six million copies there and ten million worldwide.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent CD copy for a quid (there are a lot of them out there) but if you want a vinyl version then you're going to have to stump up slightly more - the cheapest one is £145 and they go up to £300 (and it's not even signed or anything!). It's not really for me, but if you like a bit of slightly old-school, but not necessarily out-dated, female R&B then I suspect you might like this.

17/04/94 - Not a good album
01/05/94 - A puzzling one

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