Record Reconstructor

Is there a band who more embodies the difference between being 'real' and obscure, and being huge and 'selling out'?  You can pretty easily identify the pivot point for them;  in 1991, they released their self-titled 'black' album, Enter Sandman and Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters became crossover hits, and suddenly they had gone from a respected metal band with a cult following to the Biggest Rock Band In The World at the time.  Fans screamed that they had sold out, and they had - to borrow a line from the Hardcore Legend Mick Foley - they'd sold out arenas, they'd sold out stadiums, they'd sold out record stores in their thousands.  This is not that story.  Instead, I am going to talk about teeshirts. Listen to me here The problem with talking about this album, and Metallica in general, is that this is what I can probably safely call a "back catalogue backfill" purchase.  That's not a comment on the quality of the album ...

A while ago, a friend on twitter posed the question "Name a run of 3 (or more) albums in sequence by a band or artist which are all classics", and a fun conversation ensued.  It wasn't until I took this album down from my pile that I realised that this represented the 4th album in a sequence of albums all of which I think not only are classics, but are the pinnacle of the career of a woman who's voice and musical style has been a bigger part of my taste in music than any other I can think of. Listen to me here It's pretty rare that I see an album and feel like I have several things I could talk about which relate to it;  in this case, Tori Amos in general, and this album in particular, are associated with two people I've spent a lot of time living with;  one is my long-suffering partner Catherine, the other my old housemate Dave.  Because I know I'll have other albums which will make me talk about Catherine, because I can't seem to see "B...

Everyone, I suspect, has a pantheon of albums which are a cut above the others in their collection. Often, for reasons which have nothing to do with objective quality, some records just resonate with us in a way which is indefinable, but absolute. I've bought this album five different times.  It's part of a four-way tie for "Album which defined the reasons why I love music".  This might be the best album of all time. Listen to me here The one thing I wasn't 100% sure about with this album is whether I owe the credit for it for me discovering it to D, who was the only other R.E.M. fan that I knew at the time (and certainly has his own story relating to this album I am sure, but I try not to tell other people's stories), or whether I had discovered it independent of, but in parallel to, my friend.  We discussed it briefly at my birthday barbecue this year, and while I think we'd probably both heard songs from it independently (I'd seen videos ...

It's a strange and cruel trick of The Great Pile that the first time I get a chance to talk about the Foo Fighters would be this album. listen to me here I have a lot of opinions about the Foo Fighters, nearly all of them positive.  I think Dave Grohl manages to be one of the nicest, most down to earth but extraordinarily talented people in music, period.  They are one of the few bands who have an album on my "If I could only listen to 10 albums for the rest of my life" list.  I've seen them live multiple times and their live shows are excellent in every regard. In addition, I don't hate this album.  It's literally a victim of inflated expectations, where the reality of an absolutely serviceable and well crafted rock & roll record, when it is forced to follow "The Color And The Shape", is that it pales in comparison.  Going into listening to this again this time, it struck me that I couldn't name any of the songs on this album w...

The more I write these, the more I come to realise that the way I associate music and memories doesn't always have a great deal of rationale behind it.  When I saw this album was next on the list, I knew immediately what I would end up writing about for it, but when you get down to the point at which the memory and music intersect, I have to acknowledge that the connection here might seem a little arbitrary. Listen to me here This is a story about a girl.   My instinct in writing this is to be kind of vague about the identity of this person, but I can't really pin down the reason I am being so protective here.  The story isn't particularly shameful, doesn't paint either of us in a bad light (I don't think), yet something about it makes me feel like outing them would be a mistake.  Perhaps I'm afraid this blog post would somehow get back to them, and I'd get some message in the future telling me I read the entire thing wrong and I'm an idiot...

I'm back from my holidays, and excited to be back to writing my daily blog posts again.  And today's album is an exceptionally strange one. Yes, unbelievably, it's on Spotify.  Listen to me here . Soundtrack albums have always been somewhat of a curio of the music industry, it seems. Occasionally, they're a carefully curated set of songs from a films director which are intended to feed directly into the plot of the movie (think this year's Baby Driver soundtrack), or they're a blast of nostalgia intended to ground a movie in a specific era (like the soundtrack to American Hustle ), or evoke a certain certain emotional tone (as demonstrated exceptionally by the two Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack volumes).   But sometimes, and especially in the case of substandard thrillers, they are a time capsule of what marketing executives think 18-25 year-olds are into at the time, and boy howdy is this that. Released in " Fuck You, It's January ...

One. Two. Is this thing on?

I'm going on holiday tomorrow.  While I could take my laptop with me in an attempt to keep up my daily posts, that seems like the kind of thing which will end up with me associating future albums with my partner killing me for ruining our holiday. But I'll be back in two weeks.  Harass me on twitter if I don't get back to this.  Seriously. Have a good couple of weeks.  Thanks to everyone who's sent me positive feedback so far - it means a lot to me.

Happy Birthday to me! You'll all have to forgive me if today's Record Reconstructor is slightly truncated from its usual length.  You see, not only have I been struggling to find something significant about this album to talk about, but also I'm nursing a low-grade but significant hangover from a very fun day yesterday. Let's get right to it. listen to me here This is the first time I've had to write about a band I've already covered in a previous blog post.  I listened back to this over the course of this morning, sat in a car hand wash waiting for the inside of our car to be valeted before we head off on our holidays tomorrow.  And the truth is, I have a weirdly ambivalent relationship with the album which I can intellectually recognise isn't entirely fair, but nonetheless keeps me at arms length from engaging with it in the same way I did with "Whatever and Ever, Amen". I think it comes from my dislike of 'backfilling' a ...

Today's album actually has two stories associated.  One is a deeply personal one about a girl who broke my heart and left me depressed for over a year, exposes one of my biggest character flaws, and makes me look like an idiot.  The other one involves me talking about music videos. Let's do that second one. listen to me here I'm a huge junkie for clever, well made music videos, as anyone who has been around me while I am drunk, have control of the TV and access to YouTube can attest.  As someone who loves film as well as music, the capacity to take a song and make a striking visual accompaniment to it is a real talent, especially when they can vary from telling a (very) short story using music as a backdrop (Like Bjork's "Bachellorette" ), making a striking visual statement (like UNKLEs "Rabbit In Your Headlights" ), doing something clever and subtle to link the visuals to the music (like the Chemical Brother's "Star Guitar...

There are albums which make me think of stretches of time in my life, or people I've known, or just make me feel a certain way.  Then there are albums like this, so indelibly linked in my mind with a single activity, one single place and time that as soon as I hear it, I am transported instantly back to that place. listen to me here I consider myself lucky that during my teenage years, I managed to make so many likeminded friends.  Until 1990, we were a nomadic family, moving from place to place as dictated by my Dad's work for the Royal Air Force.  When we had returned from our overseas posting, we relocated to Chesterfield, which was where all my Mum's family were, while my Dad shipped off to Saudi Arabia to take part in the first Gulf War.  We'd visited the town only sporadically in the past, for summer holidays and visits with relatives, but now we were moving here permanently. Through what I can only assume was a strange combination of great luck a...

There are bands of whom I own more albums that this band.  There are bands I like more than this band (if that's a quantifiable scale).  There isn't a band in the world I've seen live more times than this band though - currently standing at seven separate live appearances. listen to me here Placebo were always going to be on-brand for me when they first hit the scene back in 1996.  A rock band who played minor key emo songs with a goth aesthetic and an androgynously beautiful frontman ticked a lot of my 19 year old self's boxes.  I remember hearing "Nancy Boy" and "36 Degrees" back in the basement dwelling days of Monty's in Chesterfield.  Ninety-eight saw me watching the video for "Pure Morning" in a Yorkshire farmhouse near Goole with random women I'd met at a festival that year, with my broken down car stranded in their driveway.  And when this album came out in 2000, we were firmly in the era of Kate in my own personal...

Now we reach the first album in The Pile that I know I've owned multiple times, which probably says something about how much I like it, and how careless I am with my own possessions, even if I'm strongly into them. Listen to me here First things first, look at that.  I willingly paid £16 for a CD, and this was probably the third time I had bought this particular album.  When you contrast that against the cost of Spotify Premium, which costs half as much per month for me to listen to basically every album I own plus a whole bunch that I don't, it's little wonder that brick & mortar music retailers have gone the way of the dinosaur - at least until the Streaming Service bubble collapses and our Mad Max future consists of bartering exclusively in physical media.  When the era of Blockbuster and HMV rises again, we're all going to pay the price. This is definitely an album that I owned originally on cassette as, in my mind, there is still a pause be...