I gave you my everything, but it was never enough for you

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

24/11/17 : The Architect - Paloma Faith

On our last visit, Noel asked who built the moon and so here's Paloma giving a perfectly acceptable, if probably inaccurate, answer. This is our second visit with the lass - last time I was surprised at how bearable it all was, so here's hoping for more of the same.

Yeah, this is all very bearable as well - it's got a reasonable amount of variety across the album and she throws herself into it all. It's not quite my sort of thing but if you're looking for something like Adele, Ellie Goulding or Ella Henderson, then I reckon you could do far worse than this. I wasn't expecting Samuel L Jackson to kick things off though!

We're at a somewhat surprising #1 with a new entry on the start of an impressive 38 week run - and she followed that up with a further 11 week run a couple of months later, which you rarely see. The rest of the top five were Sam Smith, Alfie Boe & Michael Ball, Tokio Myers (a new entry - he won BGT this year) and Morrissey (another new entry - he didn't win BGT, but I'd pay good money to watch him appear on it) and we have one more new entry in the top ten for Jeff Lynne's ELO (#9).

Wikipedia tells us this is her fourth solo album and her most successful so far, with only P!nk outselling her in the UK  this year in the female solo artist category. Apparently, it's a political album with pointed social commentary, but I'm afraid it can't be all that pointed because I missed it entirely. The only other thing that jumped out at me was the huge number of writers involved - there are 25 of them across 15 tracks, with some interesting names popping up including Ed Harcourt, Ella Henderson, Zak Abel (a table-tennis champion turned songwriter), Rag'n'Bone Man, Sia, John Newman and Eg White (ex Brother Beyond). Critically, it was received well enough without anyone going overboard about it and commercially, it didn't do as well in Europe as I thought it might have done, with #18 in Ireland being the best it did anywhere - but it did well here in the year-end charts getting to #14 in '17 and #17 in '18.

discogs.com tells you can pick up a decent version for a quid but if you want to take a risk on a signed version then it's going to set you back £84.91 - good luck with that. I imagine this is rarely listened to these days, but I bet there are plenty of people out there that can sing along with all the words when they do stumble across it - I didn't mind it at all.

17/11/17 - Misses the mark more than usual
01/12/17 - Much better than expected