Climb up the H of the Hollywood sign

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

28/07/17 : Lust For Life - Lana del Rey


This is our fifth visit with Lana and I've generally been pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoy them, but I do think there should be a rule against borrowing titles from other artists - Lust For Life is always going to bring Iggy Pop to mind rather than Lana (for those of us of a certain age, anyway).

Yeah, I'd say I'm pleasantly surprised by this as well - it's a very well constructed album with some great production on it. I wouldn't say it's entirely loveable on first listen, but it feels like it could well be a grower and it matched well with the sunny weather outside today - I can imagine it would be great playing whilst barbequing on a sultry summer evening. It's got quite strong Lorde vibes, so if you like her then you'll probably like this (and probably also know you do).

We're at #1 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a surprisingly short ten week run - Norman Fucking Rockwell, her follow-up album managed 26 weeks. The rest of the top five were Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott (another new entry), Ed Sheeran, Linkin Park (a re-entry at #4 in its 129th week on the chart) and errr, Linkin Park - ah, this was just after Chester Bennington's untimely death, because they're also at #7. And we have two more new entries in the top ten for Tyler, The Creator (#9) and Dizzee Rascal (#10). 

Wikipedia has a lot there (224 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is her fifth album and has some interesting guest artists including The Weeknd, ASAP Rocky, Stevie Nicks, Sean Lennon, and Playboi Carti and some big name producers involved like Max Martin, Benny Blanco and Metro Boomin (and plenty others!). Apart from that, there's astonishingly little of interest there - I'm amazed that so much text provides so little information. Critically, it was very well received with a couple of people saying it was an antidote to the general dross that was around at the time - which seems a bit harsh from what I've heard so far. It made a lot of year-end lists and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal (they really do have a LOT of categories) and, commercially, it did very well getting to #1 in quite a few countries including the US.

discogs.com tells us you're going to have spend eight quid to get a decent version of this but if you want the limited edition "Coke bottle clear" double vinyl edition (who makes up these descriptions?) then you're going to have to shell out £150. I think I admired rather than enjoyed this on first listen, but there's certainly a lot here to admire.

04/08/17 - Well done, but doesn't quite hit the mark for me

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