Record Reconstructor

This Week:  Laura Marling, Hungry for the Riff Raff, The Cranberries, Stromae, Manu Chao, Rubio, Will Butler (and Arcade Fire kind of), The Weeknd, Loverboy, The Cardigans Today marks almost exactly the quarter-pole of the calendar year as we head into April on Tuesday, and in that time I've handily polished off around 40% of the albums needed to hit my target.  It was looking touch-and-go in terms of volume of albums listened to over the last seven days, because the week before the start of the new financial year is like a full moon to the lycanthropic senior executives I report directly to, so they all collectively lost their mind and put a huge workload with a short deadline onto my plate.  I am going to self-check my privilege here because I work a spreadsheet job instead of doing something important and demanding like medical work or service industry or teaching, but I worked a crazy amount of hours this week, including the majority of my Sunday when I should have be...

Dashboard! As I sit here at my desk, there's a point I am fumbling towards making which I can't seem to scrape together into any kind of coherent thought, so I'm hopeful that if I just keep typing words, the path forward will reveal itself to me.  It's something about the way modern music has become endlessly vast, but in it's completeness, with the majority of Modern Western Music available at the click of a few buttons, that array of choice becomes paralysing*.  To avoid having to make a choice, or taking a risk on an album or an artist we know nothing about, we instead select from whatever is on the front page of our music platform, whatever we listened to recently, or the insane algorithm thinks sounds mostly the same.  So, with an endless undiscovered expanse of new music at our fingertips, we sit in our carefully curated swimming pool and imagine the mysteries of the ocean, but never engage with them. Sometimes, cultural osmosis spurs us out of our comfort zon...

Dashboard! For reasons which will become apparent later in the week, I've spent much of this week thinking about my time spent at the Glastonbury music festival in the year 2000.  I'm not deliberately being cryptic, it's just a timing issue so I'll talk about what spurred my trip down memory lane when I write my post on Friday, but for now you'll just have to wait patiently for the extremely mundane prestige in forty-eight hours or so.  I first started going to music festivals in 1997, and that's a story for another time when I get round to covering Verruca Salt (the band, not the fictional Roald Dahl character) in the future*.  By the time we got to the year 2000, I was committed, and was spending my summer holiday time going to two music festivals each year;  but Glastonbury was (and still is) the apex, the UK festival to have been to at least once in your life.  In that last year of the millennium** I was involved in what's best described as a complicated...

This week:  G Flip, Eels, East 17, Britney, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Jurassic 5, DJ Format, Run The Jewels, Gemma Heyes, Incubus, Johnny Flynn As I write these words, it is 5.38am, and I've been awake for about two hours - certainly at least long enough to listen to two albums since I dragged myself out of bed so I wasn't also disturbing Catherine's sleep as well as my own; I'm sure anxious insomnia isn't a gift I should be sharing.  But I'm going to choose to consider my brain's response to the continuing collapse of western society as a very well-hidden blessing, as I have a busy Sunday planned so this early start gives me a chance to get a jump on getting this blog post written and up in good time before I start cooking a Palestinian mezze meal for my friends and spend the afternoon playing Rock Band 3 with them, which promises to be a very welcome distraction so long as I am able to stay awake through it. It's been a pretty rugged mental health week b...

Dashboard! I'm fortunate in that I don't have a physically taxing job.  I don't break rocks for a living, I don't have to spend time on my feet, I'm not practising medicine or fighting fires, I don't have to interact with the public much and I don't have to try and wrangle unruly classrooms of children like Catherine does.  I can generally do my job sat in a relatively comfortable chair while listening to music.  But sometimes, my friends, my job can be a real pain.  This is in part because I have a job with a reasonable level of responsibility, there are people who care about what I do and it affects them in a material way;  me making bad choices in my job could, butterfly-effect style, lead to people losing their own jobs, or the company itself being in jeopardy.  Also, I like to be right, like to convince people I am right, like to feel like I am contributing.  But when its end-of-financial-year time in my job, everyone loses their minds, and I feel...