Record Reconstructor

  This week: Filter, Ben Folds, Self Esteem, First Aid Kit, me being bad at Excel I'm not going to lie, it's been a slower week this week than normal.  It's proving difficult to both listen to several albums per day while also watching as much snooker as possible during this slim two week window when that is permissible in our household.  As such, outside of the nine albums I covered already this week, there's only a handful of other records I have found time to listen to, and I'm already in trouble with Catherine for abandoning her in front of the TV to write this blog post. Momentum is important and once I lose it, I find it very hard to pick it back up, so here we are. While we are talking about things which have been causing me to struggle, I've started to get to situations where I do find myself with some time to listen to music, but don't have a snap choice lined up and end up scrolling around for inspiration.  This is more of a me problem, because I h...

Dashboard! I was eight and a half years old when the 1985 World Snooker Championship Final was played.  By that point, I already owned a tiny snooker table of my own, a little cut-down thing about 3ft by 2ft with 6 reds a couple of tiny cues.  If you're young, or from beyond the borders of the United Kingdom, you might not realise quite how insane the statistics are around this extremely niche, very British sport, and specifically the 1985 final.  Played in a theatre which seats less than 1000 people, the final was a best of 35 match, where each single frame of snooker can take anywhere between 6 minutes and an hour plus.  The final was divided into 4 hour sections, and the total thing took nearly 15 hours to complete over two days.  Eighteen and a half million people tuned in to watch it, which is a record for BBC2 which still stands 40 years later, with peak viewing taking place past midnight on a Monday night as the final drew to a close with the two competit...

This week: Hot Chocolate, Sufjan Stevens, Seth Lakeman, Creed, Spacehog, and a strange thing. Happy Easter everyone.  In about two hours I am going to be heading out to play boardgames all afternoon and evening, so I am slipping this one in under the wire while I have a little time.  The good news is, because the R.E.M. post was so comprehensive, and I managed to sneak in my second post of the week, I only have a few more albums to sweep up here, and maybe a little space to show off the Record Reconstructor Mystery  for you all to ponder. Let's cover the musical side first. Look, for the sake of my own mental balance more than anything I've been trying to dip in and out of ongoing news nonsense without leading me to some kind of anxiety spiral.  It's an exercise a little like dipping your toe into glowing magma every so often to see if its cooled down enough for you to stand in yet (it never has, and it hurts every time), but I'm managing to keep roughly abreast of w...

Dashboard! Hey, remember when these posts weren't 4000 words long and instead of covering 15 albums at once, I did a  more manageable five?  Well, we are back, but only because I'm trying to manage my time well.  Its Good Friday, the start of a 4 day weekend here, and I have plans for 3 of those 4 days in the books already, which means I'm both unlikely to get much album listening done between now and Sunday, and also that I'm unlikely to have a lot of time to write up a weekly wrapup this week either because hopefully I'll be spending most of Sunday playing board games with my friends. However, having just finished my full R.E.M. discography write up, I didn't immediately have a new topic to jump to, and I needed something that was relatively small scale and self contained so I could get it done by Friday morning, and still leave myself some time for some drum practice before Catherine arrives back from her almost two week vacation and I have to pick her up (I ...

Dashboard! There's a memory I'm trying to place in the timeline of my life.  It's New Years Eve, and I've been out covertly drinking at a party for teen nerds which has finished long before midnight because we all have parents who are expecting us back at a reasonable hour.  I'm walking home, with my Sony Walkman Personal Cassette Player in my coat pocket, headphones on, listening to my favourite album.  I'd be 15 years old at the end of 1991, the year Out Of Time  released, and my covert drinking had become overt drinking by the time I was 17, so 1991 seems like a likely candidate.  I can't remember exactly who's house I was coming home from, but I'm walking home up a long, grassy hill which forms the most direct route from the neighbourhood many of my friends live in at the bottom, and my parents house, at the top of it.  Back then, the land I was making a slow and slightly zig-zag ascent up was in the very early phases of conversion into a public ...