She beat me at darts and then she beat me at pool

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

09/01/26 : Divide - Ed Sheeran

Well, this is somewhat unexpected! But I always think it's good to support lesser known, struggling artists, so let's see what sort of stuff the lad was churning out in '17 (a good ten years later than last week's album, at least).  

I may, in the past (and also more than possibly in the future), have been slightly rude about Mr Sheeran but there's no denying that when he hits the sweet spot, he does it well. And there's plenty of places where he does that on here - I actively like "Castle On The Hill" and "Shape Of You" and, whilst I can tell he's trying to push people's buttons on "Perfect" and "Supermarket Flowers", I have to admit he does it well. There's also an acceptable level of musical magpieness going on here, with some of the songs borrowing from Latin and African rhythms, but not excessively so. But...

...there's also a couple of tracks on here which head down the Celtic route - "Nancy Mulligan" just about gets away with it, but "Galway Girl" is an absolutely unforgivable load of nonsense. And it gets worse the more you listen to it, because half the words don't fit into the lines - I've no idea what he thought he was playing at. But I have to admit that, as a whole, this isn't a bad album - unlike his later efforts which I've found to be very average messes, this has a decent number of decent tracks with decent lyrics, even if it could easily have been improved by being one track shorter. It's also got novelty value because it's one we actually own - and I couldn't tell you how long it's been since that's been the case!

We're all the way down at #47 in the charts this week on his 462nd week on the charts. It first charted in '17, spent its first nine weeks at the top, its first twenty weeks in the top two, its first SEVENTY-SIX weeks in the top ten and twenty weeks at the top - and it's yet to leave the chart. It's also an interesting album because it made the chart company change their rules to prevent anything like this from happening again, when he had 16 of the top 20 singles, including the top six. Back to the current chart, the top five are Olivia Dean, Sabrina Carpenter, Fleetwood Mac, Taylor Swift and The Weeknd. 

I was expecting some new entries in the chart with the Xmas nonsense having died down, but it seems like no-one's been brave enough to venture out there yet. The highest re-entry is from Djo (#57 - benefiting from the Stranger Things finale) - there are a few others, but the most interesting one is the Dire Straits best-of back in at #100. This isn't exactly fascinating by itself but it's the ninth week that it's occupied this position - incredibly, it's also had six weeks at every position from #95-#99, seven weeks at #94 and six weeks at #93! Last week I said that Rihanna would be at #61 and she's done way better than that because she's at #50 - I reckon Ed's going to drop because there's got to be some new entries next week, so let's go for #61 again. And this week's Taylor stats are two in the top forty and seven in the entire chart.

2001 has been serving me up a load of albums with large Wikipedia entries recently but this is the largest I've seen for some time (420 milliPeppers) and it tells us that it's his third album - and surprisingly little else besides notes on the critical and commercial performance. Most of the critics were nice enough about it, although there seemed to be some puzzlement with NME described it as "quietly welrd" - but those that didn't like it, really didn't like it with Drowned In Sound calling it "the most anodyne and bland pop album possible" (which feels a bit harsh).

Commercially, it's fair to say no-one cared what the critics thought about it, with it breaking all sorts of streaming records (plenty of which were then broken by Drake's More Life 16 days later). It got to #1 in far too many countries to count (let alone list), was #1 in the year-end chart here and ten other countries, has been in the top 40 of the year-end chart here for every year since it was released and is the third most streamed album ever on Spotify. So it's fair to say it's done OK for itself.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for as little as a quid but if you want the limited edition double 45 rpm vinyl and blue CD boxset then it's going to set you back £130 - pricey! As I said, I think this is a decent album but the commercial success has somewhat surprised me because I don't quite see why everyone thought it was unmissable - but they obviously really did!

02/01/26 - Wasn't expecting this