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Sep 29

Charts – 28 September 2018

Posted on Saturday, September 29, 2018 by Paul in Music

Now this is a busy week.  So bear with me, I’ll be skipping quickly over some of these…

1.  Calvin Harris & Sam Smith – “Promises”

Four weeks, though the margins still aren’t huge – it leads by the equivalent of 6,500 sales, and it’s the sales that tip it over the edge, since it’s only at number 3 on the streaming chart.  A fourth week makes it Sam Smith’s longest running number one, beating last year’s “Too Good at Goodbyes”.  The rest of the top 10 is largely static, with a touch of place-swapping.

10.  Lil Peep & XXXTentacion – “Falling Down”

This track comes from a collaborative project between Lil Peep and iLoveMakonnen that remained unfinished when Lil Peep died of a drug overdose last year.  After that, XXXTentacion contributed a guest verse, before himself being killed in June.  It’s Lil Peep’s first hit single, so it’s not unreasonable to figure that XXXTentacion is the main draw here.  Although you might expect a posthumous cash-grab, judged purely as a pop single, this is surprisingly decent.  Lil Peep was more of an emo artist than a rapper, and this is closer to his territory (understandably), but it’s more of a dreamy guitar pop track, which you wouldn’t particularly expect from either of these guys.  A version without XXXTentacion is also available, under the original planned title “Sunlight on Your Skin”.

13.  Eminem – “Killshot”

His rebuttal to Machine Gun Kelly’s “Rap Devil”, which drops back to 30 this week.  It would have charted last week, but for the three album tracks – “Lucky You”, “Fall” and “The Ringer” – maxing out his chart allowance.  This week, “Lucky You” falls to 12, “Fall” falls to 25, and so “The Ringer” is unceremoniously booted from the chart instead.  Interestingly, “Killshot” is charting higher on the sales chart (11) than on the streaming chart (17).  Over on the album chart, “Kamikaze” spends a fourth week at number one.

14.  Rita Ora – “Let You Love Me”

Ora’s last single “Girls”, with a plethora of guest stars, got a decidedly mixed reaction and stalled out at 22.  At first glance this is closer to what they wanted… but it’s at 3 on the sales chart and 34 on streams, so it’s got some work to do if it wants to avoid flaring out in week two.

21.  French Montana featuring Drake – “No Stylist”

This is only French Montana’s second hit single as a lead artist – the other was “Unforgettable” last year – but he’s a serial guest star.  You have to suspect that it’s Drake doing the heavy lifting to get this into the chart, though.  It’s (presumably) a sequel to their 2016 collaboration “No Shopping”.

31.  Khalid – “Better”

He’s also guesting on Benny Blanco’s “Eastside”, which is sitting at this week’s 2.

40.  Mumford & Sons – “Guiding Light”

Mumford & Sons were last in the top 40 with “Believe” in 2015; this is their fifth top 40 hit, the first coming back in 2009.  It’s at 19 on the sales chart.

The climbers:

  • “Happier” by Marshmello featuring Bastille climbs 5-4.
  • “Electricity” by Silk City featuring Dua Lipa climbs 10-7.
  • “All I Am” by Jess Glynne climbs 11-9.  This is now her 11th top ten hit, in a chart record that only goes back to 2014.
  • “High Hopes” by Panic! At The Disco climbs 20-17.  This has been an extraordinarily slow burner – it’s been out since June, and it entered the top 40 at at the start of August, after which it took five weeks just to get past number 34.  Even in their heyday, they never got above 13, and it’s starting to look very possible that “High Hopes” could beat that.
  • “Be Alright” by Dean Lewis climbs 22-18.
  • “Lost Without You” by Freya Ridings climbs 25-20.
  • “Best Life” by Hardy Caprio featuring One Acen climbs 27-26.
  • “Goodbye” by Jason Derulo x David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj & Willy William climbs 33-32.  I gather those “x” things you see in credits are not in fact a typesetter’s gimmick but really are how the credit is meant to read – although it’s basically an “equal billing” signal.  I thought the ampersand had that covered, but such is the march of progress.
  • “Just Got Paid” by Sigala x Ella Eyre x Meghan Trainor featuring French Montana climbs 37-37.

On the album chart, “Kamikaze” by Eminem is still number 1.

3.  Christine & The Queens – “Chris”

They – well, she – never managed a follow-up hit single to 2016’s “Tilted”, but her profile has been raised enough to repeat the album chart success of that year’s “Chaleur Humaine” (which got to 2).  The album is available in both French and English language versions; for the French version of the track above, see here.  The song is absolutely fantastic, and if you only listen to one thing on this post, go for this one.

4.  Slash featuring Myles Kennedy – “Living the Dream”

It may sound like he’s joined forces with an estate agent, but Slash had a hit album with Myles Kennedy (the lead singer of Alter Bridge) back in 2012, when “Apocalyptic Love” reached 12.  In fact, this is as high as a Slash solo album (of sorts) has ever got, the previous high being number 7 for 2014’s “World On Fire”.

5.  Suede – “The Blue Hour”

This is Suede’s third consecutive top ten album since reuniting.  2018 also sees the 25th anniversary of their debut album.  Sometimes I wonder how the economics of making videos for album chart materials stack up, but I suspect the amount spent on this video (somebody lip-synching on a swing for four minutes) probably squares up with the 379K views it’s received.

6.  Josh Groban – “Bridges”

His third top ten album – though its predecessor “Stages” was a number one, so I’m a little surprised this didn’t do better, even in a busy week.

7.  Joe Bonamassa – “Redemption”

A fairly typical position for a Joe Bonamassa studio album – though you have to read the chart record more carefully than usual to spot that, since he fairly churns out the live albums.  There’s been three of them in the last two years.

12.  Prince – “Piano & A Microphone, 1983”

Exactly what it sounds like – a rarities tape of Prince playing the piano in 1983.

Number 15 is a re-entry of Wolf Alice’s “Visions of A Life”, after they won the Mercury Music Prize.

17.  Chip – “Ten10”

Ten years in music for the guy who used to be Chipmunk (and whose first hit was actually in early 2009, but he’d have had something out before then).

19.  Billy F Gibbons – “The Big Bad Blues”

That’s the guitarist from ZZ Top, now pushing 70.  He released a previous solo album, “Perfectamundo”, in 2015, but this is his first solo effort to chart.

20.  Brockhampton – “Iridescence”

It’s their chart debut.  They’re a rap collective, though they like to call themselves a boy band (they aren’t, at least by any conventional definition of the term).  They’ve had three albums before this, but this is the major label debut.

28.  Villagers – “The Art of Pretending to Swim”

Pretty much where their previous album landed in 2015.

33.  Black Honey – “Black Honey”

And rounding us off, an indie band from Brighton.  It’s their debut album.

Bring on the comments

  1. Kelvin Green says:

    I think maybe the “x” thing came from Japan; they’ve been using it over there for decades in computer games, anyway. Things like Street Fighter x Tekken. There’s also a line of Marvel x Vans clothing, so it’s clearly trendy.

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