Record Reconstructor

  These week(s): Excuses, inevitable screwups, and weddings.  Also Ozzy Osbourne, and a grab bag of other albums. The more eagle eyed amongst you will have realised it is not a Sunday, I didn't do a wrap up post for last week or write anything this week and I am writing the wrap up for this week 3 days early.  What can I say, its been a mess recently.  It just so happens that this month we are going into a bunch of social events which leave me seeing my free time shrink down while at the same time I've been staving off spiralling anxiety issues, dealing with a short term feud with our next door neighbours about pigeons (which is too stupid to go into* but left me extremely tightly wound) and really I am just desperately in need of a holiday, so our trip to Australia in three weeks might be the only thing keeping me sane right now.   The real reason I didn't do a wrap up last week though was because I was sick;  On Saturday our friends Anja and Eric got...

   Dashboard! I was on the phone to my boss this afternoon, with whom I discuss weekend plans and talk about music every Friday, and when I mentioned to him that I was taking both of my nieces to see Billie Eilish this weekend, he asked me if I could find a point of comparison for him, which I struggled with.  While genre is a terrible construct of our need to put things into boxes, it is useful when you're trying say "it kind of sounds like this" to someone, but in the case of Billie Eilish, I found it hard to even pick a genre to slide her music into.  Too muted and quiet to be pop, but too electro to fit into the singer/songwriter mould, not loud or raucous enough to be rock but too low energy to be dance or electro, Billie Eilish has carved a genre where she only sounds like herself and any other point of comparison is sprinkled liberally with caveats and exceptions just to get remotely close to the real experience.  In the end, we settled on Bjork, as close...

  This week:  Songs to be annoyed at work to, new releases, a listening project grab bag, tangential discussion of tennis, and finally settling whether The Strokes are better than The Beach Boys. I swear each of these posts is not going to be me making excuses for not listening to 30 albums a week, but if you've noticed a slow-down in my consumption rate for the past couple of weeks, that is both based on the shoulder injury I suffered being manly last week (mostly pain free now and seems to have fixed itself, thanks for asking), but also because we've just concluded two weeks of Wimbledon tennis coverage, an annual event which sees Catherine and I glued to our sofa for much of our free time during that fortnight because we love tennis and it only happens once per year.  We've been playing Tennis together for probably nearly a decade now, somehow I have accidentally ended up on the Board of Directors for the tennis club we are members of*, and we play together in the Mixe...

  Dashboard! Last week, I heard Oasis described - in a news piece about their hugely cynical and vastly profitable reunion tour, an event solely responsible for introducing the British public to the concept of Ticketmaster's 'Dynamic Pricing' model - as 'the biggest band in the world'.  As someone who works in the world of statistics and data, this immediately gets my back up because the first question I want to ask is "how do you quantify that?  did you measure it against every other band in the world?  Where's your dataset, I want to check some things myself...".  However, journalism and hyperbole often share a sordid bed together so on its face it should not have stayed with me, annoyed me as much as it did.  My understanding of the reality of Oasis is they were a band that produced two well liked albums across 3 years, disappeared entirely into the swirling vortex of their own hype, released a third album which was so self-indulgent and catastrophi...

This week: Metal, Stevie Wonder, Physical Injury Despite having worked in the Solar Panel industry for five years now, the time has come for me to literally put my money where my mouth is and get solar panels installed on the roof of our house.  I went through the process of finding an installer and picking out parts and generally getting things prepped, and we have an install date now scheduled for the 22nd of this month.  The installers are going to need to put scaffolding up in our back garden so I spent much of this weekend clearing out old garden furniture and clearing the patio in preparation for their visit. In the process of doing so (I think the fateful moment was me hurling the significantly weighty base of a wooden outdoor table into the wood recycling section of our local recycling centre) I've been betrayed by my aging body, and something behind and under my left shoulder blade is now torn, twisted, or something else because I'm in a reasonable amount of pain and ...