Record Reconstructor

  Dashboard! In the world where it doesn't seem like much is going well, globally or in certain (generally work related) aspects of my life, you'll be glad to hear that I had a pretty good weekend.  We went to Manchester, stayed in a nice hotel, had a two nice meals out, spent time with the eldest niece who is terrifyingly turning sixteen in a few weeks time, and saw Lorde perform at the Manchester Arena, who put on a spectacular show which in turn provoked a lengthy conversation about music, performance, what it means to be a prodigy and the pressure you come under to produce new albums once you've established some kind of musical presence. That in turn reminded me that I needed to write about this set of albums, which I listened to one weekend a few weeks ago while playing Twilight Inscription and Regicide Legacy with my friends D and Darren. The connection might not seem obvious at first;  either between our conversation following the Lorde show and these two bands, or...

  Dashboard! Remember a few days ago when I talked about how Limp Bizkit's My Way  was linked inseparably from the world of Professional Wrestling because of the Wrestlemania XVII promo package?  Well, there's a symbiotic relationship between the world of fake grapple sports and the world of professional musicians. The power of a good entrance theme, a great entrance theme, and the way that can set a crowd on fire to see an incredibly fit man (and more recently, woman) walk through a curtain creates the kind of conditioned reaction Pavlov would be proud of.   It shouldn't be a surprise to you that I am no more immune to this kind of conditioning than anyone else.  You could probably play me anything off WWF The Music Volume 4** and I'd be instictively psyched as hell.  It wasn't until the 1990s that  it really became a thing, but what started with simple guitar riffs and hair metal wails, often penned by wrestling manager Jimmy Hart, to introduce ...

  Dashboard! There are several ways you can tell that I'm nothing close to a professional music critic or interrogator of cultural change.  First, I don't get paid for doing this, I have a readership of a couple of dozen people and I have fairly haphazard editing, publishing schedules and most of the choices of what I am going to cover happen at my own whims.  However, the key difference (at least, in the context of this introductory paragraph) is that I've leaned into and fully embrace the fact that I have a long history of liking and enjoying what critics would tell you is objectively terrible, juvenile, puerile musical output.  The critics, generally, are not wrong, but being true to myself here means that not only do I have to be accepting of my past choices, but I have to be honest enough to admit that a part of those past choices lives on inside me still.   So, in part, the rise of Nu-metal was my fault.   There was, for a brief moment, a ki...

  Dashboard! Way back in January, in about my third week of this grand folly, I went to visit my friend Matt and asked him to play me some albums I might not have heard, which you can find me detailing here for your edification.  Amongst the bands he played for me that afternoon as we bravely soldiered on to completing a game of Malifaux at a world record pace of one turn every 97 minutes was Jacksonville, Florida's own flipturn*, a band I knew nothing about, where I wrote this . So it seems unusual that I might have waited until November to cover flipturn's second album, Burnout Days , given how excited I was about them back in January. Well, if you are keeping a running list of all my various neuroses I have shared on the pages of this blog, here's another minor one for the file.  I went through a period of about four or five years in the pre-COVID times of discovering a band and getting very into their music, then a few weeks in I check to see if they are touring only ...

  Dashboard! It's Saturday night, there's an hour on the timer and I'm in the house on my own;  Catherine is away having fun with her friends, and I have a long backlog of albums I've listened to but not written about, so lets skip forward and talking about the trending story of the moment, and albums about breakups. Time starts...now. If you'd asked me to name anyone from the music scene of the early 2000s who might randomly pop up into the music world after a long hiatus and release a highly talked about new album, Lily Allen's name  might have appeared towards the fourth or fifth hour of me guessing, probably shortly after I guessed Duffy would have released new music.  I was convinced she had moved out of the music game for good*, trading in her short lived but moderately successful career for talk show hosting duties and having weird and not always great opinions on politics and saying them out loud.   I don't have any particular gripes with her music,...

  Dashboard! Right now I'm struggling with momentum.  In truth, it's been a pretty tough month in terms of my personal mental health between chaos at work, global anxiety, not sleeping, and a lot of demands on my attention leaving me struggling to find the energy to sit and write.  I'm staring at a growing backlog of albums I've listened to and not covered, I'm looking forward towards the finish line and somehow the 150 albums I need to listen to before December now feels more daunting than the idea that I did 850 already in ten months.  I've filled every slot in my spreadsheet now, I know exactly what I am going to be listening to in the next sixty days but sometimes I catch myself back in old habits, watching comfort youtube videos for the 18th time because I know the serotonin hit of familiarity is what my brain is craving to try and keep it on a level. Also, I need to take myself to task a little.  I balk at the idea of writing up the albums I am listening t...