Charts – 20 March 2011
Ah well, nothing stays at number one forever. After four weeks, “Someone Like You” by Adele finally slips to number two. (Mind you, it’s number one again in the iTunes chart as I write. So you never know. It could be back.)
And the new number one is…
…“Don’t Hold Your Breath” by Nicole Scherzinger. Wikipedia describes this as “an empowering mid-tempo pop song”, which pretty much tells you what to expect. It’s one of those post-break-up declaration-of-independence dance records; all pretty familiar, let’s be honest, but it’s done well enough. The song has been doing the rounds for a while; there’s a demo version out there with vocals by Timbaland and Keri Hilson, though quite why somebody thought it was good material for him, I’ve no idea.
The X-Axis – 20 March 2011
It’s the weekend of the Chicago comicon! I’m sure all sorts of interesting things have been announced. I’ll read the round-ups on Monday.
Meanwhile, it’s a busy week for reviews, with five X-books and a bunch of other interesting (or at least noteworthy) titles. So to work…
Fear Itself: Book of the Skull – Billed as the prologue to the upcoming Fear Itself crossover. Matt Fraction is writing the main event, but this lead-in one-shot is by Ed Brubaker, presumably because it spins out of his Captain America storylines. The Red Skull is apparently dead, and his estranged daughter Sin is planning to carry on the family tradition. So she and Baron Zemo raid an abandoned Red Skull base, in order to lay hands on a Magic Widget which will clearly be of tremendous importance to the upcoming crossover. The angle is that Sin is going to outdo her father by revisiting one of his failed plans from World War II and getting it right this time. Cue an extended flashback, with Captain America, Bucky and the Sub-Mariner thwarting a Nazi plan that can fairly be described as enigmatically vague. Scot Eaton’s art is fine, though the inking’s a bit heavy for my taste. But the big pay-off is rather undermined by the fact that it really just tells us something that was already in the adverts for the series proper, accompanied by some vague hinting that will no doubt make sense in seven months’ time. It’s a perfectly acceptable comic, but I can’t honestly say it gets me excited about the crossover.
Charts – 14 March 2011
Nearly the end of the week, best get this done while it’s still vaguely up to date…
If you’ve enjoyed reading the words “Adele is still number one” over the last couple of weeks, then good news – Adele is still number one. “Someone Like You” spends its fourth week at the top, though to judge from the midweeks, commercial gravity is finally going to catch up with it on Sunday.
The turnover of number 1 singles has been pretty high for the last couple of years; the last single to stay at the top for this long was “The Fear” by Lily Allen in February 2009. (Admittedly, six different singles managed it in 2008.)
Further down, it’s a relatively busy week. The highest new entry is at number 5 for “Black & Yellow” by Wiz Khalifa. He’s been releasing albums since 2006, but this is the first time he’s made the UK charts. It’s an odd song to be a crossover hit, since it’s basically a mixture of standard rap lyrics and tributes to his home town of Pittsburgh. But it does stand out from the crowd musically. To some extent it’s been the victim of a record label who still insist on hyping records for ages before releasing them – which resulted in a dodgy cover version by Hype Squad scraping the lower end of the chart last week.
House To Astonish Episode 56
Right, now that we finally have the site back up (thanks, possibly, Dreamhost!) we can get this show on the road. We’ve got a new episode of the podcast for you, where we’re talking about Julie Taymor’s exit from the Spider-Man musical, Robert Kirkman and Rob Liefeld’s new book, Jeff Smith’s Rasl heading to Hollywood and Roger Langridge’s Muppet Show languishing in Limbo. We’ve also got reviews of Sigil, Venom and… erm… Sarah Palin vs the World, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe gets square eyes. All this plus cardboard trees, waggly tongue dribble action and learning Greek on an aeroplane.
The podcast is here, or on Mixcloud here. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
The X-Axis – 13 March 2011
Well… the plan was to record the podcast tonight and do the reviews tomorrow. But Al’s car has broken down and he’s somewhere on an English verge waiting for a tow truck. So instead: reviews. Though to be honest, there’s not much out this week – a couple of X-books (X-23 and X-Men: Legacy), plus a couple of new launches, but let’s run through them anyway.
Justice League: Generation Lost #21 – Apparently this series has been tying in to Brightest Day somehow or other, but I’ve been reading it quite happily without following the sister book at all, or even being particularly conscious that there are crossover elements to it. And it’s been a good read; it’s an old-school team book reuniting some of the cast of Justice League International, with a couple of successors such as Blue Beetle subbing for the originals. It’s got a nice strong central concept: Max Lord has made everyone else forget about him aside from this Justice League D-team, and they’ve got to defeat him themselves because, again thanks to Max’s influence, nobody else believes anything they say. That’s a solid premise for a 24-issue series. The fortnightly schedule helps the pacing enormously as well; it’s a relatively rare case of a comic which actually seems to have been created with serialisation in mind, instead of being a graphic novel divided into equal chapters as a grudging concession to economic reality. Last issue, Max killed the new Blue Beetle; this is basically a downtime issue of everyone else mourning. It’s pretty obvious where it’s going as soon as Booster laments that they haven’t been able to get Beetle out of his armour, but it’s also a case where being predictable is fine; it’s heading somewhere you want it to go, the inevitable moment is satisfying without needing to be surprising, and it doesn’t invalidate the conversation scenes that preceded it. Okay, there’s a hopelessly melodramatic bit with Ice and Captain Atom that doesn’t really work. But basically it’s the “darkest just before the dawn” beat, nicely executed, in a story that needed to go there. It’s a good series.
Further Housekeeping
The best laid plans, etc. Having had a Car Incident (waiting for the nice men to come and tow us at the moment) it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be able to coordinate recording this evening. Once we know when we’ll be able to record, we’ll let you know.
Housekeeping
We’re recording the podcast tomorrow night. Reviews probably Monday. (There’s not much out, to be honest – two X-books and some new releases that I’m saving as candidates for the podcast.)
Charts – 6 March 2011
This won’t take long.
You might remember that a few weeks ago, some of the major UK record labels announced their new “on air, on sale” policy, where records would be made available to download as soon as they were released to radio. There was some speculation that this might result in records slowly climbing from the bottom of the charts. And what happened? A string of records went straight in at number 1 with no prior promotion.
But things seem to be changing. Once again, the top end of the chart is eerily becalmed. There are only four new entries on this week’s chart, none of which make the top 20. This is about as quiet as the charts get.
“Someone Like You” by Adele is number one, for the third week. And to judge from the iTunes chart, it’s got a decent shot of holding on for a fourth.
The X-Axis – 6 March 2011
After last week’s deluge of X-Men titles, this week Marvel change tack to ship three Wolverine titles. Yes, okay, one of them is Daken. But still…
Avengers Academy #10 – Well, that’s odd. The cover of this issue is the Academy trainees and the cast of New Avengers teaming up to fight magic thingies, with a big “Magic 101” banner over the top. And the interior… features Hazmat spending a day off with Leech, and Speedball delivering a lesson about how he feels about the Stamford disaster from Civil War. And that’s a perfectly good story, albeit of a rather deck-clearing sort. It addresses the obvious question of why Hazmat doesn’t just get her hugely inconvenient powers removed for good, using one of the various well-established techniques available in the Marvel Universe for such endeavours. And it continues the detoxification of Speedball, who’s going to require a lot of that sort of thing before he’ll be anything other than the poster child for really inane ideas, but points for trying. What it doesn’t do… is bear the slightest resemblance to the story advertised on the cover. Strange choice.
Charts – 27 February 2011
Don’t get too settled. This won’t take long. It’s a very quiet week on the singles chart, with a largely static top ten and only one significant new entry.
“Someone Like You” by Adele holds at number 1 for the second week. Interestingly, according to the iTunes chart, the original studio recording is now outselling the Brit Awards version that catapulted her to the top in the first place. It doesn’t look like any of this week’s new releases are posing much of a threat either, though it’s too early in the week to predict anything with confidence, given what happened on the previous two charts.
