Record Reconstructor

Of all the albums in this particular column of the pile, this is the one so far I have been most excited to be reminded that it exists and that I still own it.  There have been bands I've written about that I like more before now, there have been albums already reviewed which are loaded with more meaning.  When I saw this was coming up today, I said "Oh shit, I'd forgotten about this album, I'm so psyched to listen to it again".  Spoilers, this album still rules. Listen to me here .  No, seriously this time, if you've not heard this album before, listen to it. There's a reason I'm a statistician by trade and not an expert music critic.  Back in the mid-nineties, when the wave of trip-hop was washing over the alternative music fans of the nation, I would have given you great odds on a bet that this band were going to be the next big thing and this album would be number one for a zillion weeks in a row.  Instead, it was a big underground success,...

Here's a fun fact about the process of writing this blog for you.  I've sat with this blog post window open for the last 3 days. It's not that I haven't had time to write about this album.  It's taken me more than 48 hours to even figure out how to talk about it.  Everything about it leaves me massively conflicted, and I've probably tried about five different approaches to writing just anything , before finally committing to getting something down, if only so I can put this past me and move on to some fun albums which are coming next in The Pile.  So here we go. listen to me here Before I go off the deep end, lets start with a fun little weird anecdote.  I was 22 when this album came out, having heard "The Real Slim Shady" on Radio One while not working very hard at my job. I'd already developed a fondness for hip-hop, and the song was smart and funny and edgy and captivating and I was hooked by it immediately.   Now, people have in t...

Given my previously recorded feelings on how live albums as a format are generally terrible , you might be bracing yourself for a similarly musically snobbish post filled with outrage at the very notion of "Best Of" albums when you should simply go back and experience each bands entire back catalogue in album form.  Fortunately, I am not that much of a hypocrite.  "Best ofs" can act as an excellent sampler for a band you are late to discovering, where you're not really sure where to begin; in the case of this band, it's more a reflection of a weird mass of conflicting feelings I have about their whole enterprise. listen to me here When I was 17 there was probably only one band I hate more than The Divine Comedy, and that was incessantly cheery indie pop band "The Boo Radleys", who managed to have a name that managed to be meaningless, stupid and pretentious all at the same time, and their song "Wake Up Boo" was insufferable, sel...

Like everyone, I like to feel that in some way I cut my own unique path through the jungle that is the modern musical landscape.  There's enough variety, interest, undiscovered superstars and forgotten gems for pretty much everyone who likes music to have a similar project to this one;  very rarely is the same set of circumstances going to be what brings two people to the same album.  But sometimes the wave of the zeitgeist is too strong;  a collective moment suddenly puts thousands of people into the same path, and as a result, a musical sensation is born, even if only briefly.  The story of how I came to own this album I am sure is the same as a whole lot of peoples. listen to me here Let's just handle this business right from the jump.  This album is a pretty great female-led acoustic folk rock album.  Odds are, you already knew that.   Like a lot of music fans, I've been a fan of the "Later... with Jools Holland" shows for a long...

Yes, I took another couple of days off.  My current job has spikes of intense insanity in terms of workload and we're right slap bang in the middle of one of those.  On top of that, I've also been working on organising the annual charity Netrunner tournament I run each year, and arranging a trip to America in November to play in the Netrunner World Championships, and arranging my partners 40th Birthday Party, also in November.  So, if service is a little spotty for the next week or so, I'll crave your indulgence. So let's talk about something fun - the joy and sorrow of the support act. listen to me here I have a mixed history with support acts at gigs.  It always seems such a thankless job acting as the support;  maybe only 10% of the crowd is there to see you (if you're lucky), the stage setup and sound board are all mixed ready for a band that probably doesn't sound exactly like you, and pouring your heart and soul out for a bunch of people who are ...

There are some combinations that are really hard to make work well together.  Cheese with fish. Sandals with socks.  Ben Elton with entertaining television after 1990.  My personal contribution to this list of unlikely pairings are Music and Zany Comedy.  They're two things which, in my head, just don't seem to work together naturally.  There are some people who do it exceptionally.  I'm not sure this is one of those examples. Listen to me here This is another album I owned, first on a copied cassette from a friend, and then on cassette version of the proper album when I inevitably lost the copy, before finally grabbing this version from a CD sale at some point or another.  In what is an unusual twist for me, I'm fairly sure I became aware of They Might Be Giants through commercial radio and TV.  In 1990 we'd just returned to the UK from my Dad's overseas postings, and one of the exciting things for me was access to the radio again. ...

If you've been following along with this blog, I suspect you are starting to form a kind of picture of what my musical tastes are.  "So Rich," you are no doubt asking your screen right now, "what's it going to be today?  90's Gen X grunge, nu-metal, actual metal, or some R.E.M album?" Firstly, that's very hurtful.  Secondly, talking to your monitor is strange, you know I can't hear you. Thirdly, let me introduce a personal favourite of mine, an album I listen to at least once every couple of months, and definitely my favourite mid 2000s weird electro jazz pop record of all time. Listen to me  here In 1998 I was working at an Architects firm in Sheffield as a general admin dogsbody.  It wasn't interesting, or glamorous, but it did bring in some much needed money, and didn't require a lot of my attention, and taught me a strangely large amount about how subsidence in houses occurs.  The company didn't have any kind of intern...

Having spent over a calendar month in days writing these things, I had an interesting experience yesterday when I met for lunch with my friend Matt.  Matt's been away travelling for 9 months, as and as well as filling me with jealousy with his travels, he's also been reading my posts, and so as our lunch was drawing to a close, he asked me about the blog and we talked about it for a bit. It was initially slightly unsettling, only because I hadn't really talked in detail about this with anyone before.  A lot of the ideas which are the foundation of what I'm doing here exist really in a kind of nebulous, undefined space, and Matt asked some smart questions which made me think about what I am trying to do, which was helpful.  One of the things he mentioned was that he tended to read the posts for albums he wasn't familiar with, because it gave him an insight into why that music, that album, would appeal to someone when he, as the reader, has no frame of reference fo...

I never really 'got' punk growing up. I think past me always saw it as something deliberately juvenile, surface level rebellion, the fart jokes of the musical world.  I don't know whether that was an attitude that I inherited from my parents, or if not being part of that era, the impact and significance of punk had somehow just been lost on me as a teen. As time has passed, I've come to appreciate punk more.  I think " London Calling " is an amazing album.  I've listened to an enjoyed entire albums of The Ramones , The Dead Kennedy s, and later punk like X's " Los Angeles " and Black Flag .  I can appreciate that this album is considered to be a cultural touchstone for an era of music that predated my own and reinvigorated a music scene which had grown bloated and uninspired. All that being said, let it be known here and now that I fucking HATE the Sex Pistols. Listen to me here So today's question is this;  despite my burnin...

Sometimes I see an album in the Pile and I think "Oh, I know what I am going to write about for this one".  Mentally I was all prepared to tell the sad tale of how Kate and I broke up, what led to it, and why this album reminds me of that.  However, a strange thing happened.  I was listening to this album while repainting our bedroom walls (just a touch up, some of the paint was looking grubby from when I first did it 7 years ago), and the more I listened to it, the more I realised I had totally missed the point of it back in 1997, and how relevant it is to what is happening in the world today. So instead, I'm going to talk about reinterpreting old albums, and the crossover of music and politics.  We will get to the Kate story later, "Make Yourself" and "Enjoy Incubus" are still on The Pile somewhere... Listen to me here Let's start with something slightly off topic though.  While I was listening to this, which is an album I probably lis...

I think every music fan has a band that, after a while, buying their albums becomes force of habit rather than conscious choice.  "Monster" was probably the last R.E.M. album which wasn't just a rote purchase for me.  By the time "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" was released in '96, I already owned 9 R.E.M albums.  To stop there would seem crazy, so I just bought it.  I even enjoyed a lot of the songs on "Up".  But the level of quality had already started to fall.  Come the arrival of "Reveal" in 2001, I had to ask myself a dangerous question - did the band I spent over a decade loving suck now? Listen to me here If breaking up with Aerosmith yesterday was the mutual agreement of two people to part after the magic has gone, this feels like the gut-wrenching fear that your long term relationship is spiralling out of control, and you desperately want to hold on to how you felt before, convincing yourself that everything still alright, it...

There was a time when I was big into Aerosmith.  "Permanent Vacation" had just come out, and my closest friend Jamie had got it on tape, and had done me a bootleg copy.  It was 1987, and I was 11 years old.  I remember that a few years later, I bought him "Pump" on cassette for his birthday, but to my eternal shame, made a copy of it for myself before giving it to him.  I bought "Eat The Rich" on CD when it came out in '93, and my copy is still in the pile (though many, many months off from this). So I guess it's hard for me to say that I wasn't an Aerosmith fan;  I certainly was.  It's entirely reasonable that when Christmas rolled around that year, I found this Aerosmith Collected CD set under the Christmas tree from my parents.  But the sad reality was that by 1995, which I think is when I got this, I was 19, my tastes had changed, and Aerosmith, especially early Aerosmith represented everything to me that wasn't cool any more. ...