Blue Is The Colour

Knew the singles very well due to radio overplay in the 90s and as such thought of them as a singles band, this kept me rapt all the way through however with several clear stand outs, can easily see this album becoming standard rotation.

You had me at "don't marry her, fuck me". This is a delightful surprise! It's such a mixed bag of treasures. One minute, a sassy little pop/rock ditty, the next a growling Tom Waits-esque blues noodler. I really never knew what was coming next one track to the next and I cherished the journey. Good one!

One of the most underrated bands ever. This is a solid, rather than life changing entry in their canon, but still has all of the wit, fun and heartbreak you'd expect. A little too obsessed with a particular acoustic guitar sound, but still zips by and makes you smile with it's unexpected lines... "You don't name a boat Titanic 2"

It was fun to hear my wife singing along with this one. Turns out she'd bought it when it came out. Really good!

I owned “Welcome to the Beautiful South” and “Choke” in the 90s. Those were two of my favorite albums of my college years. Those albums have such a special connection - when this came up I started listening to them again before playing this and it has been too long. It’s exciting to experience a new-to-me album from this group that I really should have followed but for some reason never did after their second album. I like this album a lot, although I kept wanting to go back to those other two The Beautiful South albums because I like those more. Still, this album has its charms and I’m just so so happy someone put this group on this list. If you like this at all and haven’t listened to Choke (and Welcome To The Beautiful South) then I urge you to queue those up. And for my part I’ll be queuing up all their other albums that I for some reason never listened to.

Pleased to see recognition for this excellent British pop band, but disappointed to find the incredibly beautifully sung and often amusing and witty songs are a bit dull. The huge hit singles are great, the Tom Waits pastiche is fun, but the exquisitely sung thoughtful songs just don’t pull you in once you’ve got past the opening delight of the pretty singing. A band whose hits collections are a triumph, but individual albums are just a bit disappointing. The same goes for Heaton’s Housemartins albums. Get the compilations.

Who’s fuck ass child is this

Between the cover and the songs, there were so many moments I slipped and thought this was a children's album. Songs to sing to kids, the way it all feels very sing songy and calm. However when you start your album trying to prevent a marriage through carnal persuasion it's pretty clear this is not an album for kids. Not sure if that was the intention, and even though I wasn't a fan of most of them, I did appreciate the album. Again, I felt at peace listening.

Blue Is The Colour is very gentle easy listening, couple of nice singles, very unremarkable and whoever nominated it is probably quite bland, though I'll try not to criticise individual contributions when we've had hundreds of really bad albums from the original author. Since I don't do half grades it's a 3, better than a 2.

Wow this was horrible. The quirky lyrics do not make up for the terrible, cheesy 80s lounge act music.

Ew Fuck off

I think I'd call this "sophisti-pop", though it attempts to have an edge to it on the first track. I don't think it really lands with me. The songwriting is a bit flat, and I personally have a bone to pick with "Liars Bar", which is about three times the length that it should be. Pass. Favorite track: "Mirror"

I don’t mind the songwriting of this album in itself, but combined with the production and voice of the singers (which I do mind) the whole thing comes off a lot less appealing to me. Some clever lyrics though to be sure

Oh god, it's more alternative folky garbage. Is this all the other users actually listen to? Every second user album is this crap ffs. 1/5.

No thank you. Tom Waits adjacent, goofy theatrical rock stuff. I didn't like albums like this on the main list, and I don't like them here. Never again.

This one tickled my fancy.

One of mu favourite bands since childhood - so funny and talented.

Great album, but does feel maybe a hair bloated. I loved a few tracks of this album enough to elevate it to a firm 4 though!

I liked this pretty well, interesting lyrics. The music was very competently performed, a little too soft a touch for me though, it needed some more edge and texture.

This was a good alt country style album from a British band. Perhaps calling it country is too strong, but it certainly fits in with bands such as the Drive By Truckers. Lyrically this album was stark, laying bare the destitution and dignity of the forgotten and overlooked. The production is dated, but the album was still very good.

Rating: 7/10 Best songs: Don’t marry her, Little blue, Blackbird on the wire, Alone

This was a massive album in the 90’s with some great hit songs. Not going to pretend this is the greatest album ever (it’s got a lot of filler), but surely it deserves to be on the original list.

You can tell they put a put a lot of work on making every song unique.

Catchy lyrics and music!

Blue is a kind of self-conscious indie record before its time; Not surpassing that, it gets points for creativity. The songs refuse to lock in place and the universality is first-order. Bad move: sacrifices almost all of it. I can easily imagine it as one's first Beautiful South record, don't have to imagine in fact.

It needed to grow on me, but in the end it still didn't. I found it more to be some background music

This sounded beautiful indeed, but also a bit tidy and nothing out of the ordinary.

I wanted to like this, really I did, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way. The songs were good but sounded awkward or forced in some way, like they were trying too hard to be clever. A good example: Liar’s Bar sounds like it could have been a really good song, but recording it with a bad Tom Waits impersonation? It just made me cringe. Made what should have been a really good song almost unlistenable. 3 stars.

Beautiful South is one of those bands I've always liked well enough when I heard them, but have never taken the time to explore. So this was a nice album to get. This is really charming, smartly made pop, that has aged quite well. I tend to prefer Paul Heaton's vocals to Jacqui Abbott's, but it's all good. Fave Songs: Blackbird on the Wire, Have Fun, Alone, Rotterdam (or Anywhere), Mirror, Artificial Flowers

Quintessentially British tales of life and society. Some really excellent songs. Rating: 3.5 Playlist track: Don't Marry Her Date listened: 05/08/24

Alternative rock, pop rock. Ni fu ni fa.

Ok

The album consists of properly written songs and pleasant melodies. Don't Marry Her is fantastic (as a kid I thought it was Don't Marry Her, But Me)

It's a unassuming album. Not sure it's carried the test of time, however. I'm wondering even back then if it had a lot of traction.

Never hear of this group or album. I definitely enjoyed some of it but other songs not so much. I am not a Tom Waits fan (see my other reviews) and this definitely dragged on as it got longer. Honestly not much more to say it but it's quite forgettable. My personal rating: 3/5 My rating relative to the list: 3/5 Should this have been included on the original list? No. There is more than plenty of bland 90s British music. We don't need more.

Another album doing the all genres any% speedrun and I hate to admit that I enjoyed the Tom waits segment but I could also just be really high.

Quite nice

Middle of the road bangers! It’s slightly depressing that I’m now the key demographic for these miserable little upbeat ditties. To tap my toes and nod my head through a collapsing marriage and a midlife crisis. I kind of want to mark them higher but it’s just so middle of the road it can’t be anything other than a 3.

They're bit of a national treasure the BS. It's all in the lyrics, and as usual they are whip smart though these are really dour at times. Still not for me as the music behind it is a bit bland. Respects though.

Enjoyed listening to this.

Moderately surprised to see some The Beautiful South in the list. Hull's best known export (outside of chip spice) making decent music in one of their later albums. Will be interesting to listen to this again for the first time in 25 or so years. This is both better and worse than I remember. The songwriting is perhaps more ambitious than on their earlier albums, but too often that ambition results in an absolute miss. Blackbird on the wire is the first of these - it's too pedestrian, too repetitive and too sentimental to justify nearly five minutes of album time. Liar's Bar also over-eggs the pudding, this time trying to extend what should be two and a half minutes of appreciative homage into nearly six minutes of a chore. The absolute low point of the album though is the cover of Artificial Flowers, which feels like a drag after just a few seconds, and laboriously drags us to the final two tracks of the album. One God isn't that bad, but once again Alone stretches out too long. The radio play pop songs are grand.

A fun sophisti-pop record with some catchy songs and ridiculous lyrics that sometimes really worked for me and sometimes really really didn’t. Other people seemed to enjoy the ‘Tom Waits pastiche’ but I found it quite disappointing, as it completely misses the soulful quality of Waits’ voice and just opts for a generic gravelly growl - though the closer with that Heartattack and Vine-style bassline was a highlight. Rotterdam is the real star of the show though, a charming and jaunty banger perfectly positioned near the middle of the hit-and-miss tracklist

Terrific lyrics, with so many punchlines laughing at the face of pretty dark subject matters. Unfortunately, the music is inconsequential sophistipop most of the time. I get that the contrast between the two is intended, but the apparent primacy given to words over music in an LP is always gonna be a flaw in my book. And even if your book has different requirements, it is obvious that The Beautiful South constantly risk coming off as too smart for their own good here. Just picture them delivering those lyrics over quaint muzak with a deadpan expression on their face. I mean, c'mon. It's so easy to turn them into a caricature, because they already are one, right? What's a little maddening here is that there could have been easy ways to make the music way more interesting than what it actually is, and this from start to finish. Ironically, the band themselves give precious suggestions in a very small number of tracks on how this upgrade could have been pulled off. Hear the harmonically uneasy bridges on "Little Blue", for instance, like some unnamed evil presence bubbling beneath the tranquil, civilized surface. Or listen to the slower, more spacious "Blackbird On The Wire" and closer "Alone", which sound a little like a synth-laden, melancholic Leonard Cohen tune circa *I'm Your Man* (Is the title of the first example betraying some subliminal influence from the Canadian bard here?). Here are intents that go beyond the usual fare given by this LP for sure. And more of them would have been welcome. Not that more of those subtle yet pivotal flourishes would have changed the whole plan music-wise. Unfortunately, such different-sounding intents have stayed unexplored for the most part, and so the extremely competent personnel seemingly just do what they've been trained to do for five albums up to this point. And for me, it's a little... self-indulgent. To take another reference point from across the pond, around the same time this record was released, another potentially too-smart-for-their-own-good project like The Magnetic Fields, also using either male or female singers according to the song played, also knew how to create a cold, sophisticated backdrop for their equally wry and/or cutesy lyrics. But the difference is that they most often spiced things up with some zingy details here and there. Or conversely, they could let subtle forms of emotion be conveyed through the vocal performances. As they could let a universal chorus transcend their intellectual endeavors if need be. All sorts of elements that I find lacking in the cold, cold reptile that The Beautiful South generally is to my ears. So it's gonna be a "soft pass" for me. I can appreciate the 'literary' values of the lyrics, but there's no way the music of this thing can speak to my soul. Sincerely hope this does not give the blues to the person who submitted this album. It's just that "blue" might be the "colour" indeed, but when it comes to nineties indie, there are other ones on the palette. And I want to see them shine as well. 2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 3. 7.5/10 for more general purposes (5/5 for the musicianship, overall performance and production values + 2/2 for the lyrics + 0.5/3 for the musical artistry). Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 16 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 28 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 60 (including this one) ---- Émile ! J'ai répondu à ton message. Regarde environ 20 reviews au dessus ! Je compte juste vérifier toutes les deux semaines environ. On est pas aux pièces, comme on dit sur le vieux continent.

Sometimes you can judge an album by it's cover.

Kitschy pop with occasionally interesting lyrics. I had to check to see how close it was to done which by law goes from 3 to 2

I actually think there is nothing in this album that I actually like. It sounds hopelessly out-dated and cheesy. The lyrics are distracting and weird in a wrong way. For me, a total miss-hit.

Some of the odder lyricism and songwriting I've heard from an album here – at first intriguing, but things became much too amorphous and disparate as the LP progressed for there to be much of an artistic statement. Not sure what this band is trying to convey or affect here, and I think I was more confused at the album's end than before I had even begun.

It was ok. Some of the songs had humorous lyrics. The album was just there and I do not plan on revisiting it.

Really up and down attitude wise. Peaked early with don't marry her. The liars bar song was fucking awful.

Aside from this being pretty depressing and dark the music itself was also pretty blah. The soft pop folk style was very much lyrically based which made some of the songs a bore to get through with the bare bones instrumentals. Overall this is not something I heard before and really could’ve went without. 3.8/10

Lyrics that are sharp as a tack for songs that are dull as a dishwasher. At one point one of the vocalists does his best Tom Waits impression over a fairly uninteresting blues-piano number. I am perplexed as to why this band is popular at all. This album sold over a million copies. How! Why. CONTENDER FOR THE LIST: I don't think so.

Band name doesn't ring any bells, but I recognize "Don't Marry Her" from somewhere. No idea where though. That godawful album cover is really not doing this any favors, but it ain't that bad. Folksy sophisti-pop, with some crazy-ass curveballs thrown into the track listing. Not something I'd ever return to, but at least it was listenable. Strong 2/5.

Very calm, soft pop, sometimes boring or slow

Suprisingly annoying. it seems like what you'd get if you wanted music with child protective padding on it. It is passionless and everything about it seems soft. Lyrics are uninteresting or awkward (one god), but then you hit Liars' Bar which was the closest i've gotten to fast forwarding a song in the 1,200 albums i've listened to. It is the most irritating gravely voice that comes off as more as a bad faked attempt. It was borderline painful.

I thought this was awful but it really does fit well with the book list.

Another stinker. This got old, real fast.