An empty street, an empty house, a hole inside my heart

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

14/01/01 : Coast To Coast - Westlife

This is our fifth visit with them Oirish lads - previous visits have ranged from the heights of "surprisingly tolerable" to "I'd rather poke my eyes out than listen to this again". It's our second visit with them this year - I didn't enjoy the last one and I have absolutely no expectations that this is going to be any better.

Well, it's still not great but it doesn't feel quite as wet as our previous visit and I think there's more variety here as well. There was also a pleasing lack of fiddle or penny whistle, and whilst they obviously still love a late stage key change, they're less obviously signposted here than I was expecting. I obviously didn't love any of it, but it could have been a lot worse - I can even tolerate their versions of "Uptown Girl" and "I Have A Dream" but I do have to say it's a particularly bad cover of "Against All Odds", although Mariah Carey has to share the blame for murdering a song I like. I really didn't need seventy minutes of it though - it dragged big time towards the end 

We're at #10 in the charts this week on their tenth week of a surprisingly short 27 week run - it debuted at #1 and spent the next six weeks at #2 (kept off the top by The Beatles for all of them) but slid out of the chart pretty quickly after that. The top five this week were The Beatles (yup, they're still there), Texas, Westlife (their previous album, up from #73 last week), Eminem and Coldplay and the highest new entry was Sarah Brightman (#37). 

Wikipedia doesn't have loads on the album, telling us it's their second and the album title refers to the fact that they come from both coasts of Ireland - they're wild, them kids, I tell ya. The only other thing that leapt out at me was the number of producers involved - THIRTEEN of them (and Simon Cowell was also in there as an executive producer - what on earth does one of them do?). Critically, the reviews were pretty negative with the best thing anyone said about it was Yahoo Music's comment that "if Coast to Coast was chopped in half it could be a decent album" (but would obviously need to be renamed if they did). Commercially, it did better than I expected globally - it OBVIOUSLY got to #1 in Ireland, but it also got to #1 in Singapore, #2 in New Zealand, #3 in Sweden and #6 in Mexico and Norway! It sold 1.8 million copies here, being #4 in the '00 year-end chart (after only being available for two months of the year) and seven million copies globally.

discogs.com tells us this is another fifty pence album and the absolute most you can spend on it is £18 for a Japanese CD - complete with obi (these things matter, apparently). This ain't a great album, but it joins the last couple of visits with them in not making me want to poke my eyes out - which I'll take as a partial win.

07/01/01 - Could have been worse
21/01/01 - Decent enough, except for the last track