I got that sunshine in my pocket - got that good soul in my feet

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

07/03/17 : Trolls: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - Various Artists

OK, so I knew I bent the rules last time to avoid something - so why on earth aren't I doing the same to avoid this? Tbh, I'm not entirely sure - I think curiosity has got the better of me.

Oh yes, this is not good - with one notable exception. "Can't Stop The Feeling" is an absolute banger and sounds like it's existed forever - you can quite imagine someone like The Jackson 5 having recorded it in the 70s and it having been covered by multiple artists since. And if that had been the case, I'm pretty certain it still would have appeared on this album because most of the rest of the tracks are covers, sung in character (thankfully, I've never seen the film, so have no idea who the characters are) with some of the lyrics changed to make the references more troll-relevant. It's quite interesting that Anna Kendrick provides vocals on quite a few of the tracks because, like the tracks in the Pitch Perfect films, some of them are almost interesting in what they've done with them - and some of them have been absolutely murdered. However, having said that, I had a Pinky & Perky album when I was younger which I loved and this is a million times better than that, so there are far worse things young kids could have been listening to at the time.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on their twentieth week of an impressive 61 week run, with this being as high as it got (it spent 22 weeks in the top twenty though, so it did pretty well for itself). The rest of the top five were Stormzy (a new entry), Rag'n'Bone Man, Ed Sheeran and Adele (on her 67th week of a 94 week run) with the next highest new entry being Future, all the way down at #21.

Wikipedia tells us that most of the original music was written by the surprisingly high-powered trio of Justin Timberlake (who also starred in the film), Max Martin and Shellback. The only other notable facts relate to "Can't Stop The Feeling" - it was the best selling song in the US in '16, won the Grammy Award for Best Song Written For Visual Media (which feels like a very niche category) and was nominated for the Best Song Oscar (losing out to La La Land's "City Of Stars"). There's no word on the critical response to the album (I suspect they knew better than to even bother) but it did very well commercially, getting to #1 in Australia and #3 in the US, where it was the eleventh best selling album of '17. 

I suspect this isn't one for the record collectors and discogs.com tells us you can pick up a CD for a couple of quid, but if you want the vinyl then it's going to set you back £25 - and if you want to go really mad you can head over to the US and pick up the limited edition pink vinyl for, go on, guess. Yup - $200. What kind of lunatic would do that? Not me, for certain - except for the second track (why on earth wasn't it the opener?), this was a pretty dreadful album, but even I admit it did what it was supposed to.

10/03/17 - Not for me