Record Reconstructor

This Week: Foreign language recommendations, Lorde, Beth Gibons, a weird A Perfect Circle album and The Sounds. I'm not a natural linguist;  you could argue I'm not a natural anything apart from blonde (and even these days it's more like someone dipped me in a muddy puddle streaked with grey than the golden blonde I was when I was younger) - rarely has there been a skill, trait or party trick I haven't had to practice endlessly in order to get to a baseline level of competency*, and languages are the things I struggle with the most.  When my parents went to live in Spain, I became so embarrassed not being able to speak to the people they shared a village with that I signed up for an 8 month course in Spanish at Chesterfield College (Spanish for Business Travellers).  A year later, armed with my new knowledge I flew back to Spain only to discover that all of my practice was useless in the face of the Extrameños accent -where they speak incredibly quickly, drop the ends o...

  Dashboard! Quite out of nowhere, and for no obvious reason that I can think, the following lyrical couplet from Lost For Words   by Pink Floyd has been rattling around in my head all week. So I opened my doors to my enemies And I asked "Could the slate be wiped clean?" But they told me to please go and fuck myself I guess you just can't win While I am pretty sure this is not the reason my subconscious has decided to serve this up to me this week, I remember feeling a weird, visceral shock on hearing this song back when I listened to 1994's The Division Bell , the album it hails from, because this was the first time I'd heard (or registered) hard R rated language from a band I had been listening to since I was three years old.   The trick I've learned over the years when faced with a song fragment cycling endlessly through my brain is to just go and listen to the song.  Apparently, the psychological reason is that the brain ends up trapped in a loop it can...

  This Week: New HAIM album; songs for drinking, geopolitical disasters This is a day late but I had a pretty busy weekend;  we were entertaining my mother-in-law from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, had the social event of the summer in the Locksley Beer Festival on Saturday, and then a day watching tennis at the Nottingham Open Final yesterday, leaving me little time to write my blog.  It's also been incredibly hot all weekend and it's caused me to sleep very badly, in addition to generally sleeping badly because my global terrible news quota has meant my worry bucket is very full.  I've become concerned that I am somehow speaking terrible, anxiety-inducing apocalyptic events into existence through this blog like some internet-enabled Death Note notebook, so I'd just like to say that I think this week, hugely positive things will happen in global geopolitics, capitalist systems will be exposed and everyone will get a free week off.  At this point, that had...

  Dashboard! ** When I started thinking about approaching this project, listening to over 100 different albums in a year and what that really looked liked, I set myself a challenge.  Could I name 10 artists who had at least a 10-album deep discography that I'd be happy to listen through from start to finish?  If I could do that, that would mean that that was an easy 10% of my decision making done, and I could have some confidence that it was possible without sending my crazy listening to hours and hours of albums I'd never heard before just to make up the numbers. Tori Amos was the first name I put on that list.   When Catherine came home this week to me cooking while listening to From The Choirgirl Hotel , she said " Are you doing all the Tori albums?  That's a lot of albums..." .  I'm pretty certain Tori Amos is going to stay at the number one spot on my Most Listened Songs widget in my dashboard for the rest of the year; only really Taylor or Sufjan...

This Week:  Influential albums by black women, a great recommendation, more musical titans pass away and other mad ravings. As particularly narcissistic theories go, this past month has been brewing in my mind a terrible concept;  that somehow, future historians find these writings, one of the few records left after a great cleansing or censoring of all recorded history by right wing authoritarians because it's far too insignificant to bother covering up.  What if the vague allusions to world events I've scattered throughout these articles ends up being one of the few primary sources left in 2355 when historians look back on this time from their habitation bunkers and ask what the hell we were all doing?  If that is true, future historians, let it be recorded that this week, somewhere between the 10th and the 15th of July 2025 is when stuff got really scary.  From Israel and Iran toying around with the big button marked "World War 3" to political activists imita...