RSS Feed
May 6

Charts – 4 May 2014

Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2014 by Paul in Music

It’s one of those weeks where there’s a single major new release and otherwise it’s pretty much dead from number 25 upwards.  But let’s go through it anyway…

40.  Pharrell Williams – “Marilyn Monroe”

This is going to be the next single from “G I R L”, charting on the start of the advance publicity.  It’s not going to be another “Happy”, but it’s sure to go further than this.  And yes, that’s Kelly Osbourne doing the spoken break.  There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.

39.  Alicia Keys featuring Kendrick Lamar – “It’s On Again”

From the soundtrack of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and presumably selling to movie goers.  I’m… not convinced that Kendrick Lamar’s voice is a good match for what Alicia Keys does, certainly not in the intro.

This is Keys’ first UK hit since “Girl on Fire” made 5 in 2012, and unless it goes a lot further, it will break a run of top ten hits going back to 2008.  Well, kind of – she released several more singles from the “Girl on Fire” album, but none of them even made the top 75.  Does that count as an unbroken run of top 10 hits, if your intervening singles don’t chart at all?  Hmm.

Kendrick Lamar gets his second chart credit, following his guest appearance on Robin Thicke’s “Give It 2 U” (the follow-up to “Blurred Lines” that everyone’s already forgotten about).

27.  Michael Jackson – “Love Never Felt So Good”

For artists with a lot of unreleased material in the drawer, death is not the end – it’s just the beginning of their Tupac phase.  This is the lead single from Jackson’s second posthumous album, “Xscape”.  It’s a 1983 demo that’s been polished up here by Timbaland (who’s filled out the arrangement with some samples from Jackson’s 1979 album track “Workin’ Day & Night”).  Frankly, it’s not hard to see why Jackson shelved it during his life; his performance is fine, but the song itself is ordinary.  But he did co-write it, and it has previously seen the light of day in a version by Johnny Mathis, so Michael Jackson completists will be glad to hear the original.

22.  Justin Timberlake – “Not a Bad Thing”

This week’s highest climber, up 13 places.  Touchingly, Wikipedia still informs us that the lyrics “centre around the semantic field of love”.

20.  Paloma Faith – “Only Love Can Hurt Like This”

The follow-up to the top 10 hit “Can’t Rely On You” is a Diane Warren song, which is a bit of a change from Pharrell Williams.  It’s not exactly a Motown pastiche, but it’s certainly a track that wants you to keep firmly in mind where it thinks its heritage lies.  And the song it’s just about strong enough to get away with it.

1.  Calvin Harris – “Summer”

Officially, this is the lead single from his upcoming fourth album – so apparently previous single “Under Control” has been quietly forgotten about.  You know what you’re getting with Calvin Harris – specifically the same rhythm he uses for most of his synth riffs – and this doesn’t exactly deviate hugely from the formula.  Well, except that this is one of the increasingly rare tracks where he does his own vocals.

This made it to number 1 on a lead in the first half of the week – it’s not going to manage a second, and since we’ve finally hit a week with no big new releases, there’s a distinct possibility of Mr Probz rebounding.  That would at least break the run of weekly new number ones, though Mr Probz wouldn’t have been the artist I’d have guessed to do it.

On the album chart:

  • “Caustic Love” by Paolo Nutini is still number 1 after 3 weeks.  Who knew Paolo Nutini was so popular?
  • “Everyday Robots” by Damon Albarn at 2.   None of the singles from this made the chart (the highest was “Heavy Seas of Love”, which got to 70).  Here’s a video for the title track.  Blur’s “Parklife” must have been marked down somewhere, since it re-enters at 24.
  • “Tribal” by Imelda May at 3.  Irish rockabilly.  This is her second album to chart in the UK.  Single: “It’s Good To Be Alive”.
  • “Embrace” by Embrace at 5.  Their sixth album, coming eight years after the fifth.  They’re a bit less Coldplay these days.  Single: “Follow You Home”.
  • “Indie Cindy” by the Pixies at 6.  The first new studio album since “Trompe Le Monde” in 1991.  All the Pixies’ albums have gone top 10 in the UK, except for their debut “Surfer Rosa”.  Single: “Snakes”.  The Pixies are responsible for one of the worst music videos ever made, “Velouria”, which consists of 23 seconds of footage the band running towards the camera, slowed down to the running time of the track.  (Supposedly it wasn’t even intended as a subversive anti-video stunt, it was just thrown together so that they could tell the BBC there was a video for their single.)
  • “Diploid Love” by Brody Dalle at 33.  Debut solo album by the former lead singer of the Distillers (though that was ten years ago and she’s been in a whole other band since then). Single: “Meet The Foetus / Oh The Joy”, also featuring Shirley Manson.
  • “9 Dead Alive” by Rodrigo y Gabriela at 39.  Mexican acoustic guitar duo with a concept album of tracks in tribute to a somewhat random assortment of dead people, including Eleanor of Aquitane and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Single: “The Soundmaker” (which is appropriately dedicated to Antonio de Torres Jurado, widely regarded as the maker of the first modern classical guitars).

Bring on the comments

  1. Nick Goodchild says:

    Parklife was 99p for a day on Google Play. Interesting to see what that means in terms of the charts.

Leave a Reply