Record Reconstructor

  Dashboard! I wrote these words in February of this year and when I wrote them, I was half convinced that we would never make it there. When I say we'd never make it there, it's a line that covers a multitude of outcomes.  I might have given up, abandoned this project as too time consuming, too self indulgent even for my own wildly inflated sense of the value of my own thoughts, simply been too lazy to pick it up and let it slowly wither away and die a quiet, peaceful death.  I, personally, might not have made it.  I look at the date of birth on my driving license and I think of all the people who never made it as far as I did in life;  death is cruel and it cares nothing about the dreams or goals or stupid internet projects of who it claims.  But what I really feared was that none of us would make it to August, that our self-inflicted social apocalypse would have claimed us all already, that the madness that rages throughout the geopolitical spectrum woul...

    Dashboard! This Week:  Lightning Round, Holiday Plans It's been a busy few weeks, in part because of the impending arrival of our annual holiday, this year a two week trip to Australia.  I'm bad at getting excited for holidays because I generally spend so much time mentally processing the things that need to be done before we go away that I can't really relax until I am through airport security and it starts to feel real.  What this has meant though is I have been listening to albums at a far faster pace than I've been able to find time to sit down and write about them, so I'm working at a significant deficit at the moment.  In an effort to go on holiday with as close to my desk clear as possible, my plan is to get all the outstanding albums documented in this wrap up.  In order to make it so it doesn't take forty hours to write, I am limiting myself to 50 words per album, in the hopes that cuts the core of what I want to say about each of them. Fi...

Dashboard! Yes, I'm putting two up on the same day, look, time has got away from me this week a little and we have guests arriving today who I'll need to socialise with this evening so this is going to be a more truncated than normal weekly wrapup, but fortunately its only seventeen albums so that shouldn't take too long.   On with the show. I listened to my 200th unique album in its entirety since January 1st on Monday this week, driving back from Manchester after watching the Superbowl, and as a special treat (and to keep my .swifties.com tag on Bluesky validated) I decided to listen to the most recent Taylor Swift album.  First, a couple of notes - I understand the machinations of releasing multiple versions of albums to keep them in streaming charts longer and produce limited run vinyl and the like.  When I am listening to albums, if there are multiple versions, I'll almost universally choose the studio version over any extended cut that is available (though with...