Your Honour please - gotta believe what I say

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

23/12/01 : All Rise - Blue


Well, I wasn't expecting to follow Robbie with an album I was actually less keen to listen to - but hey, here we are. I'm lead to believe this is peak Blue (and I certainly don't mind the title track) but expectations are really quite low.

Well, I can't assure you it's peak Blue, but it's certainly better than our first visit and probably better than our second visit (but I don't remember it at all). The opening, title track is actually pretty decent and the rest of it isn't dreadful and there's more variety there than I was expecting. Yes, a whole album of it was a bit too much but I think my main complaint is that it takes itself all a bit too seriously without the content to back it up - however, it's fair to say I'm not the target market for this and I suspect others would be disappointed if they didn't chuck in some "oooh yeahs" and "hey girrrrls" in there.

We're at #3 in the chart this week on their fifth week of an obviously totally deserved 53 week run, with it peaking at #1 in its 22 week. It then took a month off and came back for another fourteen weeks - madness, I tell you. The rest of the top five this week were Robbie (I'll be typing that for a bit yet), a Gabrielle best-of, Westlife and S Club 7, with the highest new entry being The Wu-Tang Clan (#77).

Wikipedia had more than I was expecting (107 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is their debut album and gives us way too much detail on the formation of the band.  iI does, however, explain that they never really took off in the US because, despite being in New York for 9/11, in an interview soon after Lee Ryan stated that the whole thing was "being blown out of proportion" and asked "What about whales? They are ignoring animals that are more important" - it's fair to say he's not the sharpest tool in the box. 

The only other thing I noted was the number of writers used - 31 across 12 songs (including Gary Barlow) suggests they pretty much called on everyone they could find. Critically, the reviews were pretty middling, although there's a definite sense of "well, it could have been a lot worse" and commercially it did pretty well over here, selling 1.3 million copies as well as in Europe, making the top five in a lot of places and also, for no obvious reason, in the Far East, getting to #1 in Singapore.

For the second album in a row, discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for fifty pence, but the most you can spend on this one is even lower, at a mere ten pounds. And that's all I've really got to say about it - it's not for me, but (and it hurts me to admit it) I suspect there's going to be far worse offerings throughout the year. 

16/12/01 - Just too much cheese
30/12/01 - Not dreadful, but not essential either

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