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The journey continues... The House Carpenter's Daughter (2003) This is slightly different from what has come before... 1. Sally Ann A very violin heavy, langourous track with a nice woozy feel to it - even if doesn't really go anywhere. 2. Which Side Are You On? This is a 1931 track by US activist Florence Reece, which we've nominally already met when Billy Bragg covered it - but this is somewhat closer to the feel Florence was going for, complete with banjos. I quite like it (and it suits a softer voice than Billy's), but she's certainly not going for the commercial look here. 3. Crazy Man Michael This is a Fairport Convention track, with some more nice violins - it's nice enough, but there's certainly not enough content to fill up 5:13. We definitely feel like we're round the camp fire here, with more noodling than structure. 4. Diver Boy Yet another nice enough song without a huge amount of content - and I seem to recall this is my biggest problem wi...

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts. 11/03/79 : Blondes Have More Fun -  Rod Stewart Our eleventh visit with Rod and he's going to be in full disco mode, isn't he? I very much doubt I'm going to like it, but I suspect I'll enjoy thinking how much more my Dad would have hated it back then - he was NOT a Rod fan... Oh yes - we open with "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" which I suspect even the most hardcore Rod fans would struggle to argue is his best track (although it did get to #1, so I guess plenty of people liked it). However, I was pleasantly surprised that was as disco as things got with most of the rest of it being more typical rock-and-roll-Rod or ballad-Rod, and a somewhat peculiar choice of cover of The Four Tops' "Standing In The Shadow Of Love", which he could easily have ruined but it was actually surprisingly decent. I can't say I loved this album but it wasn't anywhere close to being as bad as I was expecting, s...

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts. 18/03/79 : 52nd Street -  Billy Joel Only our second visit with Billy, but I think I like his general sound from this era, so I'm looking forward to it. Yeah - this is pretty decent. I recognised "Big Shot" and "My Life" from his Greatest Hits Vol I (which is cracking) but the rest of it works very nicely alongside those tracks. The general sound isn't a million miles away from The Stranger , but it's a bit jazzier - and considerably jazzier in places, with some very decent horn playing in there. But obviously it's still mostly piano-based with a definite US Elton John feeling to it - I liked this. We're at #18 in the charts this week on his eighteenth week of a decent 41 week run, with #10 being as high as it got in the previous week - it also popped back for two more weeks in '84 for no obvious reason. The top five this week were  Bee Gees ,  Blondie , Barry Manilow,  Chic  and Elvis Co...

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts. 25/03/79 : Desolation Angels -  Bad Company Our second visit with BC - and I'd completely forgotten the first visit , so I imagine we've got some pretty forgettable 70s rawk here. On first listen it does feel pretty forgettable, but it also feels pretty decent and I can imagine that multiple listens (which everything got back in the day) would make it stick. There's some nice guitar work on there and Paul Rodgers' voice works well - and that's about all I've got to say about it really (so slightly less than I had to say about Bat Out Of Hell ).  We're at #15 in the chart this week on their third week of a nine week run, with it peaking at #10 in its second week. The top five this week were Barbara Streisand,  Bee Gees ,  Blondie , Barry Manilow and  Chic  with the highest new entry being  Supertramp  (#6). Wikipedia tells us it's their fifth album and is named after the 1965 Jack Kerouac book ...

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts. 01/04/79 : Bat Out Of Hell -  Meat Loaf I was quite surprised we didn't get to meet this on Rolling Stone's list - I can only assume they're sniffy about it for some reason (they can be pretty fucking sniffy when they put their mind to it). It also seems surprising we haven't met in on of the other years because it's spent 530 weeks in the chart since it was released in '78 - but it's only spent five of those weeks in the top ten, peaking at #3 in the week after his death in '22. So it's actually quite lucky that we get to meet it at all, but I'm very glad we did - it's also the second album of the year that I own (and I properly bought this one!). And yes, I know it's all super cheesy and massively overblown, but I really like this, so we're going to go into quite some detail here. The album opens with the title track, which manages to have surprisingly little content considerin...

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 18/07/25 : moisturizer - Wet Leg  Our second visit with Wet Leg - I'm looking forward to this particularly because I'd forgotten how much I liked their debut album .  As much as I remember things, this is in a similar vein but has a bit more variety - which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. It doesn't, on first listen, have anything as immediate as "Chaise Longue" but "catch these fists" (the first single off the album) did jump out for me as being pretty decent. The rest of it feels like it would need a few more listens, but I reckon it would sound good live. I also got the impression that one of them is in lurve because there were some surprisingly soppy lyrics at times! We're at #1 with a new entry in the chart this week and the rest of the top five are Oasis,  Oasis , Justin Bieber (a new entry) and  Oasis  - making this the first week in 48 weeks that  Sabrina  isn't in the...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's   top 50 films of 2024 #40 :     The Dead Don't Hurt Viggo Mortensen directs, writes, composes and acts in this beautifully shot and sombre film about an old-school hero in a 19th-century frontier community fraught with tragedy. Never heard of this one, but Viggo is often an indicator of quality - although we've actually only met him once so far and he was completely wasted in that . But I'm certainly intrigued enough to give it a chance. It doesn't go out of its way to explain what's going on - it's set in a small US town  "a long time ago"  in the past (and I"m not going to argue with The Guardian that's it the 19th century) and it also includes flashbacks (which I guess are "a longer time ago"). It's basically a Western and you get the impression Viggo is one of the good guys and there are obviously quite a few bad guys but you're not entirely sure how bad. The film plays fast and l...