Fields of fire that passed the train - the sky is victorious, but here comes the rain

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

24/06/01 : Outrospective - Faithless


I think Sunday 8pm is my favourite Faithless album, but this is a close second (and I own it, taking us to six for the year). I've not listened to it in years but am expecting to enjoy it, and it will be a nice companion piece to Dido that we had earlier in the year.

Yeah, this was a fun revisit. There's a reasonable argument this is more of a vibe than a fully fledged album, but it's a good vibe (although more suited to the summer than a cold February morning). "We Come 1" is probably the best known track and I like it, but I'm not sure I need 8:14 of it. Dido pops up on "One Step Too Far", but I think I prefer Zoë Johnston's contributions on "Crazy English Summer" and (particularly) "Evergreen" - a fun fact that I just learned is that Zoë also co-wrote and provided the vocals on Bent's "Swollen" which is one of the best chill-out tracks out there. Back to the album, I can see this won't be for everyone, but I like it.

We're at #4 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a seventeen week run - for some curious reason, it then went away for six months before coming back for another seven weeks. The rest of the top five were Travis, D12 (a new entry), Muse (another one) and Shaggy, with the next highest new entry being Nitin Sawhney (#40).

Wikipedia has remarkably little on the album - it's their third album and the cover art is a photo from the '68 student riots in Paris. Critically, it was generally well received although NME only gave it 4/10 and Rollo himself has said it's his least favourite Faithless album. Commercially, it did much better in Europe than I imagined, getting to #4 in Switzerland, #3 in Germany, #2 in Norway and The Netherlands and #1 in Belgium. One other point of interest from the internet is that it never occurred to me that outrospective was an actual word - I just assumed they were being clever-clever.

discogs.com tells us this is a one pound album (relatively expensive for the year) but if you want the 180 gram gatefold reissue from '17 it's going to set you back £50. Which I won't be spending, but I very much enjoyed vibing along with this and will try to remember to revisit it in the summertime - it feels like it would be a good bbq album. 

01/07/01 - A lot more bearable than expected

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