Album: This Is Me by Charlie McDonnell

Yep, I do albums now. Well, this is my first album review, but I do love my music, so why not review albums too? Off topic side note, I'll get around to reviewing the newest Harry Potter film at some point tomorrow too, I want to write about it so badly! Anyway, This Is Me.

Charlie McDonnell (you'll probably know him as charlieissocoollike) is a pretty famous YouTube vlogger. He's so "pretty famous" that he's the most subscribed YouTuber in the UK, with 680,000 subscribers (thanks, Wikipedia!). He's a big fan of writing music, and he's pretty bloody good at it too. He's posted a few songs on his channel, and he's in two bands (Sons of Admirals and, my preference, Chameleon Circuit (a Doctor Who rock band!!)). This Is Me is his first ever solo album, and I have to say, it is a bloody good one at that.

To be brutally honest, the opening track, Rhymezone.com, didn't fulfil my expectations as much as I'd hoped. It's literally a song about trying to find words that rhyme with each other for songs. It has a pretty good tune to it and it is catchy, but there's something about it that doesn't quite agree with me. It seems like a song that he just wrote to fill up his album (which, ironically, he actually does with A Song About A Song, but does so with a very tongue-in-cheek feel to it, which I love). The quality from then on just gets better and better. The following is a quintet of old favourites that we've seen before on his channel like A Song About Acne and Duet With Myself (the latter has had more than 3,000,000 views on YouTube, and I even link to it in one of my posts on my normal blog, which you can see by following the link at the top of the page, if you wish), re-recorded for a better quality sound to them, almost re-mastered, and they do sound brilliant. There's always something great about hearing something broken down and raw, but when you hear a well recorded song, it's very satisfactory.

The rest of the album is a mix of old and new, with two standouts from the new selection - Bread and the title track, This Is Me. Bread is actually quite a beautifully told story about a young girls aspirations about becoming a baker (very cleverly called Flora Spread), this is the first single, or rather the first video from the album, which will be embedded at the end of the review, but I really do like the song. This Is Me is a completely different song, it's literally a description of Charlie's anatomy, but the way it's written is brilliant, each body part is like a reflection of Charlie himself (These are my hands/on my arms/on my conscience/with fingers that shake/while they strum). I loved it.

As a whole, this is actually an excellent first outing from Charlie, I've been listening to it all day today, and I don't plan on stopping.

Out of 5, this is a very well deserved 4.

Bread: