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''Life in Mono'' is the third studio album by English pop singer
Emma Bunton
Emma Lee Bunton (born 21 January 1976) is an English singer, songwriter, actress, and media personality. She rose to fame in the 1990s as a member of the girl group Spice Girls, in which she was nicknamed Baby Spice. With over 100 million recor ...
. The album was originally set for a November 2006 release in the UK, however it was later pushed back to 4 December 2006. Much like her previous album, ''
Free Me'', the album experiments with elements of 1960s pop music. For this particular album the musical arrangement was more directed towards 1960s French pop music, with some elements of British 1960s pop and
Motown.
Background
The album was inspired by 1960s sounds, like
motown,
bossa nova and
pop.
Bunton had been working on her third release since winter 2004. The album's title track is a cover version of the hit "
Life in Mono" by 1990s
trip hop
Trip hop (sometimes used synonymously with " downtempo") is a musical genre that originated in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom, especially Bristol. It has been described as a psychedelic fusion of hip hop and electronica with slow tem ...
band
Mono
Mono may refer to:
Common meanings
* Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease"
* Monaural, monophonic sound reproduction, often shortened to mono
* Mono-, a numerical prefix representing anything single
Music Performers
* Mono (Japanese b ...
, best known through its usage in the 1998 film ''
Great Expectations''. The track "Take Me to Another Town" contains a
sample from
Herb Alpert
Herb Alpert (born March 31, 1935) is an American trumpeter who led the band Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass in the 1960s. During the same decade, he co-founded A&M Records with Jerry Moss. Alpert has recorded 28 albums that have landed on the ...
's 1965 "Green Peppers". Songs recorded during this period that did not appear on the final album include "Crazy", "Rhapsody", "Secrets", "Crazy Beautiful", "Ladylike" and "In Another Life".
Due to Bunton's pregnancy all forms of promotion were cancelled after a few months. Rumors of a third single surfaced through websites after Bunton stated she was thinking of releasing a third single, however this never came. The album tracks "I Wasn't Looking (When I Found Love)", "Perfect Strangers" and "Take Me to Another Town" were rumoured as choices for the third single.
Singles
*The first single taken from the album was a
cover of
Petula Clark
Petula Sally Olwen Clark, CBE (born 15 November 1932) is an English singer, actress, and composer. She has one of the longest serving careers of a British singer, spanning more than seven decades.
Clark's professional career began during the ...
's 1964 hit single "
Downtown". It was released on 13 November 2006. It was the 2006
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
official
charity single
A charity record or charity single is a song released by musicians with most or all proceeds raised going to a dedicated foundation or charity.
George Harrison's "Bangla Desh" single in 1971 is commonly acknowledged as the first ever purpose-made ...
and reached No. 3 on the
UK Singles Chart
The UK Singles Chart (currently titled Official Singles Chart, with the upper section more commonly known as the Official UK Top 40) is compiled by the Official Charts Company (OCC), on behalf of the British record industry, listing the top-s ...
.
*The second single, "
All I Need to Know" was released on 12 February 2007. It charted at No. 60 on the UK Singles Chart.
Critical reception
''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
''s Alex Macpherson found that ''Life in Mono'' "continues in the same vein" as previous album ''
Free Me'', "with breezy Motown rhythms and tastefully swooping strings offsetting Bunton's candyfloss-light vocals exquisitely. Though she has largely eschewed the playful pastiche that made ''Free Me'' such a triumph in favour of a more languid subtlety, it's still a sound no one else in British pop is pursuing. And it's difficult to think of anyone who could pull it off more delightfully than Bunton does
..There's an undercurrent of vague wistfulness that never quite leaves her voice, lending it emotional clout beyond its technical limitations."
Jaime Gill from
Yahoo! Music UK called the album "a rather lovely record and quite possibly the last
Spice
A spice is a seed, fruit, root, bark, or other plant substance primarily used for flavoring or coloring food. Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are the leaves, flowers, or stems of plants used for flavoring or as a garnish. Spice ...
-related release which anyone in the world barring immediate family members even vaguely cares about - she chose wisely. Like its charming predecessor ''Free Me'', ''Life in Mono'' comes wrapped-up in a vogueish '60s French pop gleam, all sugary harmonies, luscious strings and crafty
Bacharach
Bacharach (, also known as ''Bacharach am Rhein'') is a town in the Mainz-Bingen district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the ''Verbandsgemeinde'' of Rhein-Nahe, whose seat is in Bingen am Rhein, although that town is not withi ...
style arrangements.
remarked that "while unlikely to be a chart topper, nevertheless ''Life In Mono'' is a charming record and reason enough for Emma to delay that pension-boosting Spice Girls reunion any time soon."
''
Digital Spy''s Miriam Zendle opined that "there are a whole number of problems with this album, though Emma Bunton's voice is not one of them. It's utterly bland and very repetitive in terms of content. It seems to be geared very much towards the Christmas market and as such is incredibly cheesy and soft-focus. It's hard to find any tracks that really stand out, as they pretty much all sound exactly the same. Bunton's gentle, lovely vocals are the only thing that keeps the album from sinking into forgettability, but at the end of the day, it's just not enough."
AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databa ...
editor Sharon Mawer called it "a safe album, light and fluffy with almost no substance".
Talia Kraines from
BBC Music
BBC Music is responsible for the music played across the BBC. The current director of music is Bob Shennan, who is also the controller of BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 6 Music, and the BBC Asian Network.
Officially it is a part of the BBC's Radio ...
felt that "there's little on this album that could see Emma bothering
nother top 5 hit That's not to say little ol' Baby Spice hasn't tried
..but while she may be continuing the Sixties vibe of ''Free Me'', there's nothing that even flirts with the beehive razzamatazz of "Maybe"."
Chart performance
The album was Bunton's first not to reach the UK top 10.
''Life in Mono'' debuted on the
UK Albums Chart
The Official Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales and (from March 2015) audio streaming in the United Kingdom. It was published for the first time on 22 July 1956 and is compiled every week by the Official Charts ...
at number 65 on 10 December 2006 and fell to number 75 in its second week before dropping out of the chart the following week.
Track listing
Charts
References
{{Authority control
2006 albums
Emma Bunton albums
Universal Music Group albums