And the lights in every broken, blown-out window scream of nothing

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

22/12/17 : Revival - Eminem

Ah - what say's Xmas #1 Album more than the latest offering from Eminem. This is our sixth visit with Mr Mathers (the 27th artist to reach this milestone) and I believe he was in a bit of a creative slump around this time, so expectations are not high - oh well, it's not like it's 77 minutes long or anything. Oh, hang on...

Hmmm. A lot of this is surprising, for a number of different reasons. The first (and possibly most) surprising thing is how much of this is just boring, which I wasn't expecting at all. It's not terrible but it's just not skilful, witty, controversial or repugnant - so what's the point to it exactly? Amusingly, "Offended" is pretty offensive (with some very impressive lyric spitting) and it's actually quite enjoyable to roll your eyes at naughty old Slim. But most of it is just him rapping pretty averagely (for him, at least) over a mediocre backing track (often featuring an obvious sample which required no thought at all) accompanied by a guest artist (who often does more than Eminem).

And this album uses an awful lot of guest artists - it's something he's done in the past to great effect, but it feels like the default option here and it's definitely a case of diminishing returns. Which leads to the second most surprising thing because I actually liked the one he did with Ed Sheeran - what is going on?!? Overall, it feels like a decent enough album if you're looking for an album of someone rapping over other people's tracks but, whilst it's obviously Eminem, it just doesn't feel like an Eminem album. One final thing - it has a most strange interlude, which is 51 seconds long, doesn't feature him at all and I had to really rack my brains to remember the tune it uses is Regina Spektor's "Human Of The Year", which seems like a most bizarre choice indeed.

We're at #1 with a new entry (what a strange time to release it!) in the chart this week on the start of 32 week run. The rest of the the top five were Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, P!nk and Rag'n'Bone Man and the next highest new entry is a Linkin Park live album (#32). 

Wikipedia has a decent amount on the album (247 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's his ninth album and has a shed load of guest artists, including Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys, Skylar Grey, Kehlani, and Pink and there are also TWENTY producers involved! Despite there being a load of other text, there's remarkably little of any interest - unsurprisingly, there was an awful lot of teasing and trickery involved in the run-up to its release. Critically, the reviews were pretty negative, with most people making the points I made above but being less kind about the results. Commercially, of course, it made no difference what anyone said because it took the world by storm, getting to #1 in Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, Finland, Latvia, Norway, Switzerland and the US.

discogs.com tells us this is a pricey album, with you needing to hand over three quid to get a decent version of it but there's a surprising number of sealed copies of the double vinyl version available for £40 (maybe they read the reviews and just decided not to bother listening to it). I don't think this is a bad album as such but it just seems a bit unexpected and pointless - which isn't at all what you expect from the man.

29/12/17 (blog) - Mildly overwrought