Friday, July 22, 2022

The Stars Beneath my Feet-James Blunt Album Review:

 



James Blunt decided to come out with a greatest hits album with two discs which is a great idea for a successful musician with six studio albums but the twist was he released some new music on it. The new music is his first new release since the end of 2019 just before the pandemic.

He has four official new songs on the album(Love under pressure, Unstoppable, I came for love and Adrenaline) and all have the same tone of his music style-emotional lyrics sung well/catchy choruses and the music is well put together with him either on guitar or piano. One of those songs “Adrenaline” hit #1 on the charts in China which proves he was never a one hit wonder. Songs like “Smoke signals” and “Cuz I love you” are songs I am not familiar with is because they were considered bonus tracks on previous albums with the later being a live version.  That is one of the few issues with this greatest hits collection-by putting bonus tracks on it when most fans only have the original album version to go by, adding a song he did on someone else’s album with the song “OK” with someone I never heard of, and adding a cover by the PixiesWhere is my mind” as well is not how you put together a greatest hits album.

If he wanted to come out with new material he could have done what the Foo Fighters just did with their latest album and make it like an EP where they only did eight songs for “Medicine at Midnight” which was a great album. By adding four new songs, a cover and two bonus tracks is very similar to what 3 Doors Down did with their greatest hits album by having nine number one hits but with three new tracks.

He pretty much got most of his best songs picked for this greatest album collection but he missed out on plenty of tracks from his 2010 album “Some kind of trouble” only picking one track, two of the best songs off his 2017 album “The Afterlove”, picked the three singles off his 2013 album “Moonlanding” instead of picking the best tracks and a few tracks off his 2007 album “All the lost souls”. This is what happens with four wasteful tracks and the four new songs taking up spots on the greatest hits collection. It was about time he had a greatest hits collection but most of the time a record label comes out with it and decides what is on there so this time at least he decided what would go on it.

James has come a long way from being just discharged from the British army playing his guitar singing sad songs with his writing skills and musical genius over the past 17 years as his music has grown more positive with each album he puts out. This is just another great addition to his discography of music even with the blemishes.


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