She was there, diamonds in her hair - singing out a dead man’s song

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

01/12/17 : Who Built The Moon? - Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds


So this is our third visit with NGHFB and I might have mentioned that I really don't see why Noel feels the need to include his name in the band (even though I'm pretty sure it's not Noel who's responsible for such nonsense) and I'm also not convinced that later period Noel uses all the song writing skills he has previously deployed. But let's see where we are here, shall we?

Hmmm. I actually liked this more than I was expecting - there are some decent tunes on it, although I'd struggle to say the same for the lyrics. But, the decent tunes are all very derivative - even I noticed that one of them sounds almost exactly like The Beatles' "Come Together" and I'm sure there must have been others similarly duplicated. So, I'm kinda pleased that Noel is introducing classic sounds to the youths - provided they go on to listen to the better stuff and thank Noel for his efforts.

We're at a somewhat surprising #1 in the charts with a new entry on the start of an even more surprising 33 week run - who was buying/listening to this for so long? The rest of the top five were Sam Smith, Little Mix, Ed Sheeran and Alfie Boe & Michael Ball and the highest new entry was Andre Rieu (#14). However, we also have to mention the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra this week because they have two albums in the top ten alongside Elvis (#6 - a re-entry) and Roy Orbison (#9).

Wikipedia tells us this is their third album and was released a month after Liam recorded his debut solo album (so you can probably guess what we've got coming up in a month's time). In getting to #1, it gave Noel his tenth consecutive album to get to the top, making him the first artist to do so in the UK. And the only other fact of any interest is that it's Noel's wife (at the time), Sara McDonald, on the album cover. Critically, the album was well received with quite a few people stating it was the best thing they'd done so far - David Holmes gets quite a few nods for his production work as well. Commercially, it did OK across Europe, generally getting into the top thirty but it made it to #9 in Switzerland and #2 in Ireland - it got to #48 in the US (which seems like a decent effort) and also, quite obviously, #1 in the South Korea International Albums chart.

discogs.com tells us you're going to have to shell out £1.50 to get a decent copy of this but if you want a CD signed by the man himself then it's going to set you back £200 - quite why anyone would take the risk on that online (or anywhere else) is beyond me. I have certainly been rude about NGHFB in the past but I have to say this is way better than I was expecting - it might be derivative, but at least it's copying stuff which is actually interesting.

24/11/17 - Pretty decent
08/12/17 - This left me cold

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