Ladies and gentlemen, I'm about to resort to violence
Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.
02/12/01 : They Don't Know - So Solid Crew
2001 - you're really spoiling me! I'm sure this holds fond memories for plenty, but I do not count myself amongst their number. I guess I might be impressed by bits of it, but it's feeling unlikely.
Well, let's just start by saying this squarely isn't aimed at me and I shouldn't be offering any opinions on it - not that that's going to stop me. But, to my surprise, I'm going to start by being nice - it certainly isn't 100% dreadful and there is a reasonable amount of variety across the album. "21 Seconds" is a bit gimmicky, but it's also kinda interesting and the use of the Knight Rider theme tune as the backing track to "Ride With Us" works well (although apparently Busta Rhymes did the same in '98).
It was also fun to recognise Ms Dynamite - she certainly makes it easy by saying "dynamite" a few times, but her voice is pretty distinctive. She's also definitely a step above most of the crew when it comes to the quality of her rhymes - because some of the other rhymes here are BAD! Cringily so. It also often feels very tame - you just think "awww, bless 'em trying to be all street". My other major complaint would be that 76 minutes is just too long, with some of the tracks really outstaying their welcome and being very repetitive. Yes, it's really very repetitive. Did I mention how repetitive it is? However, I can believe this album felt a bit different at the time and influenced quite a few artists that came after, although how much they credit So Solid probably varies greatly from person to person. Overall, I didn't love the experience, but it was certainly more enjoyable than Westlife (and I found a lot more to say about it!).
We're all the way down at #12 in the charts (because there are a lot of best-ofs selling in the run-up to Xmas) on their second week of an impressive 23 week run, with it peaking at #6 in its debut week. The top five this week were Robbie, Blue (a new entry), S Club 7 (another new entry), Gabrielle and Westlife, with the next highest new entry being Anastacia (#14).
The Wikipedia entry makes up for me being all chatty about it by telling us it's their debut album and listing the singles, whilst also giviing us the unfortunate information that their debut single wasn't actually eligible for the charts because of the number of remixes on the CD single, which is a bit of a fuck-up by someone now, isn't it? Somewhat unusually, the entry doesn't list the personnel involved, their entry suggests there were 19 of them at the start but they grew to over 30 at one point - allegedly they're still going, but there's nothing listed since '13. Critically, the album was apparently received favourably by the NME and BBC, but commercially, it only did anything here.
For the year, this is an expensive album, with a decent version setting you back a whole quid, but if you want the limited edition triple album vinyl version it's going to set you back £32 - outrageous! I certainly didn't love this, but it was nice to have something that was at least interesting in places. Yup, the bar has been set pretty low for the year so far.
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