Record Reconstructor

  This week: The Internet, Brandi Carlile, Tame Impala, Wilco, Fleetwood Max, Sarah McLachlan, Bruce Springstee n, Sneaker Pimps, INXS and Maroon 5 It's a three-day weekend here in the UK which means that Mondays are the new Sundays when it comes to posting weekly wrap ups.  There are a lot of moving parts in play in the household this week - first, Catherine is away on a holiday with her mother on the Scottish island I want to move to one day, which is making me jealous, but has also offered me an unexpected Garbage Week Redux opportunity which, I'll admit, I have not taken any advantage of, mainly eating home cooked meals and staring at my computer trying to figure out how to bring in my Pearl Jam article for some kind of crash landing. The other major concern has been my own impending trip away, this time to UK Games Expo, one of the largest Board Game conventions in Europe, at the Birmingham NEC starting on Thursday.  My first UKGE was I think 2014, when I went for a ...

  Dashboard! [[Authors Note:  This is now day four into trying to find a path through this post and so whatever comes out of my keyboard in the next couple of hours is just what I am going to publish, for fear of being stuck here forever.  Know that whatever the finished article looks like, I am probably not happy with it, but the show must go on.  Sorry Pearl Jam, you deserved better.]] Normally, when I am writing one of these articles the prose comes fairly naturally.  Either I go in knowing what it is I want to say and I kind of write towards an objective, or I have a story I know I am going to tell in the context of the music, or if its something I've not heard before or don't have wild feelings about, I just write about how the music made me feel.  I've been trying to write about Pearl Jam for nearly three days now and when I had a talk with myself just now to try and figure out what the problem is, it's that I have too much to say, too many stories, t...

This Week: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Chvrches, Wet Leg I spent the evening with our friends last night watching the Eurovision finals and while I am not going to talk about the show because I know at least one person who hasn't watched it and intends to do so, I mention it in the context of me having a very low grade hangover not helped by staying up till 1.30am last night and then having to get up at 7.30am this morning to go play a Tennis match.  This is my way of saying that this is going to be a mercifully short wrapup this week, in part because I have been listening ahead to albums by a band I am going to cover next week and I am only half way through, so I won't be writing about those, and because I already covered a lot of my listening last week in my previous two articles. Apart from that, no major news to report.  Catherine is getting ready to go away to the Scottish island I would like us to relocate to permanently as part of my plan to ride out the global and national ascend...

Dashboard! Throughout the years, I've had people ask me why I enjoy Eurovision.  " I thought you liked music!"  they say with a sarcastic smile, " Isn't it all just trashy Europop?" , and if I'm honest, I've never really known how to respond to that without finding a way to offend the person asking the question.  Because what I want to say is " What you mean is that it's different from the narrow view of music you confine yourself to, that you are not open to the idea of things outside of your very nation-biased viewpoint also having value which isn't immediately clear to you, and that you can't see past your own preconceptions to understand how incredibly entertaining it can be.  I do  like music;  what you like is some  music." That kind of unnecessarily confrontational rant is hard to pull off.  A few years ago, I heard the hosts of the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me  (yes, I am referencing them again) talk about Eurov...

Dashboard! I thought long and hard about listening to Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet  (an album I owned on cassette tape and listened to on my walkman when I was a young teen) for album number 500, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.  If I were a bigger Bon Jovi fan, if it was a less significant milestone I might have done it for the bit.   Here we are, five hundred unique studio albums consumed in 132 days of listening.  It's all downhill from here, an easy coast across the finish line for 1000 just around the corner.  Strangely, while I say I don't plan these things ahead of time really, I know exactly what album 1000 is going to be already, I have that in my head as something to aim for.  Album 500, however, snuck up on me, and suddenly I was in the middle of planning a tranche of albums I was going to listen to this week and realised all of a sudden that one of them was going to end up being my half-way point.  So I pushed back my mini-listeni...

This week:  Bon Iver, Paul McCartney, Death Cab, Ani DiFranco and a grab bag of other artists So, I'm not sleeping again.  Good for my productivity - if listening to albums at four in the morning and writing these works at 7am counts as productive - bad for my general focus and energy levels.  In this case, it's not exclusively the general state of the world which is summoning me from my comfortable bed in the early hours, though that's definitely still a factor.  In this case, I think either one or both of Catherine and I are fighting off some kind of low grade summer cold;  nothing major, but it's making Catherine snore like a rusty chainsaw at the moment, and there's really no solving for it.  So for the past few nights, I've been awakened by the miniature grinding wheel taking up residence next to me, which snaps me awake;  and once I am awake, both my body and mind betray me.  My ancient and infirm body tells me that since I am awake, I shoul...