Record Reconstructor

  Dashboard!  I said in my Linkin Park post that my desire to listen to Collision Course  originally made me want to write about mashup albums, but instead I ended up listening to the entire Linkin Park discography.  Well, I did that, and I still wanted to write about mashup albums, so here we are. It's 2004, and I am sat in my private office in the University of Sheffield where I should be working.  However, it's summer, and there's not much going on, but that doesn't stop me having to be in the office, making myself useful somehow.  What I'm actually doing is sitting on an IRC channel I share with a subset of people I got to know through the Something Awful forums, a kind of Reddit precursor back before the internet was as terrible and useless as it is now that big money has its grubby mitts all over it.  I'd joined SA back in 2003, before all the terrible posters registered from 2004 onwards, after finding links to some forum posts and proto-memes w...

  Dashboard!  Content Warning:  Suicide, Depression I'm notoriously bad at being stoic.  I'm good value at weddings and funerals, or wherever emotions are running high, because I will be stood there, trying to keep myself in check, while silently leaking tears like a tap with a broken seal.  I cry at movies, and TV shows, and books and sometimes (at the right times), at songs.  I used to be kind of embarrassed or ashamed at this inability to be stonefaced and uncaring, but as the years have gone on, I've become more accepting of it.  Having empathy for others, and to feel the emotion inside and around you, whether it's cynically manipulated there with TV soundtracks and shocking character deaths, or whether it's a genuine moment of grief or pain or joy shared with someone near you, is something to be celebrated.   This video makes me cry every time I watch it.  I just clicked on it again to check I was linking the right one, and it made...

  Dashboard!  I've spent a lot of my life asking myself, "what am I good at?".  Inferiority complexes and imposter syndrome are nothing new in the world, nor are they unique to me, but since childhood, I've always been around seemingly effortlessly talented people who can accomplish things I could never aspire to.  My father the spy/diplomat/musician with his speaking five languages and playing 20 different instruments, a talent that skipped me and passed to my sister, though we both got a similar dose of my families history of mental instability.  I know people who can sing, write, act, create amazing art, who are funnier, smarter, more analytical, confident and cooler than I am.  They're better cooks, tennis players, painters, and musicians than I, and a host of other hobbies I've dabbled in in the past.   All hope is not lost though.  The two things my near five decades have taught me are a decent talent for self-reflection (thank you, yea...

  Dashboard!  I get it, naming things is hard.  Names are important, they have power and weight and meaning.  You can stop people mid-flow talking about an idea or a film or a character or a song when you say "OK, but what's it called?", and the shutters go down behind their eyes/the creative process freezes in place like it was encased in ice.  And that's just one person.  Now imagine you need to find a name that two, or three, or five, or eight, (or thirty nine if you are The Polyphonic Spree) people all agree is good and appropriate and most of all, cool and memorable. Why then does the eponymous / self-titled album irritate me the way that it does?  Is it worse when it's the first album in a band's catalogue, or if it comes several releases into a discography?  Is there ever a good reason to release a self-titled album?  These are all questions I've spent the day thinking about while listening to a selection of self-titled albums, and whi...

Dashboard!  I should have known better.  I should have known before I opened my mouth.  Sometimes you just start typing and your brain looks for some kind of apt comparison, and without any kind of research, or even the most cursory of fact checking, you say some dumb shit out loud and then you find out 3 weeks later how wrong you were and you feel obligated to make amends. Here we go. It seemed like such a safe pull In my post about late-era R.E.M., the second ever post proper in this newly revitalised version of Record Reconstructor, my statement about there not being a ten album deep back catalogue of Sabrina Carpenter albums to go through was technically correct, but if I am honest, I thought the number of studio albums she had released prior to Short n' Sweet  was zero-to-one;  certainly not FIVE.  She's only twenty five years old!  You know who else has six studio albums released by the time they were 25?  Prince!  Bob Dylan! ...

  Dashboard!  Another week down, and another seven days of running away from a series of bands I know I will enjoy because I worry that I will be burning listening to them for the rest of this year by throwing them away into the teeth of the early weeks of January.  Instead, following the trend from last week, my album choices have been dictated by the strange connections my brain chooses to forge between musical artists, albums, and events in my life.  So as well as listening to ten different albums covered in this weeks previous blog posts, here's everything else I listened to this week grouped into some semblance of structure. Starting with a rare single album, I listened to this late last Sunday evening while having an existential crisis making katsu curry sauce.  I'd got all flustered because a number of ingredients I was expecting to be there were not because they'd been used earlier that day unexpectedly by my partner, and the local grocery store 5 minute...