Music makes me feel good

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

31/03/17 : Wonderland - Take That


Our fifth visit with the lads - I'm sure I'll recognise some of it, but none of the track titles are ringing any bells on first read.

Nope - no bells run at all. None of it was hateful, but it all felt a "let's be like Coldplay and fill out arenas with people waving their phones" button-pushing exercise. And I struggle to imagine many of these tracks survived their live show after that particular tour - I'm sure those that packed out the shows loved them though. My only other comments are that I really didn't need the ukelele backing on "New Day" and what on earth are they doing on the album cover?

We're at #2 with a new entry in the charts this week on the start of a fifteen week run - I suspect they would have been hoping for a bit longer than that. The rest of the top five were Ed Sheeran, Drake, Rag'n'Bone Man and (quite obviously) Vera Lynn with the next highest new entry being James Blunt (#6).

Wikipedia has a surprisingly small amount on the album - it's their eighth and their second as a trio following Jason's departure in '14. It feels bizarre they used ten different recording studios across London, New York, North Carolina and Los Angeles - I suspect their carbon footprint for the year wasn't all that great. Critically, people were pretty meh about it with The Guardian agreeing with me that "the overwhelming feeling is of an album made purely to justify taking the show around the arenas". Commercially, it did OK across Europe without setting the place alight, with #18 in Switzerland and #3 in Ireland being the best performances away from here.

discogs.com suggests I'm correct that it's not a massive fan favourite because you can pick up a CD version for a couple of quid - quite who's going to shell out £180 on the deluxe box set which consists of the CD and a few posters is beyond me. It certainly won't be me - my main take-away from this was how cynical and boring it felt. 

07/04/17 - Better than expected

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