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...

This Week:  A bunch of bands from the mid 90s, my 400th album of the year, a real grab bag of other stuff. It's been a hell of a week.  I'm trying not to beat myself up too much about my pace appreciably dropping this week, primarily because my job has become a stress headache inducing nightmare which doesn't look like its going away any time for the next couple of weeks. and the last thing I want to do is put more pressure on myself to write here when I feel like my time is already massively constrained.  I still enjoy it, as evidenced by the fact I wrote about Orla this week and I have a bunch of wrapup content to put up today to keep my hand in, but this week also saw the first 24 hour period where I didn't listen to a single album, this Saturday.  I'm annoyed at myself because I did listen to like 95% of Something To Tell You  by HAIM while Catherine and I were driving around doing errands all day before she went off on her Easter break and I just never fini...

  Dashboard! It's been seventeen and a half years since my first date with my partner Catherine;  we met, as was the style at the time - before internet dating became an entirely different environment (as I understand, I myself have been out of the game for a while you see, but I hear horror stories) - on Match.com, exchanged a few messages, enough to arrange a meeting for coffee the week before Christmas at the Showroom Cinema Bar in Sheffield.  I told her much later on that during that first date, when I went to the bathroom, the fly zip on my jeans broke completely and I spent the second half of that date very subtly draping my jacket over my crotch area to prevent her from thinking I was either unable to dress myself or giving very inappropriate signals.  Our second date was a week after New Year, and the rest is history.   For two people who spend a lot of time listening to and discussing and sharing music, we somehow don't have 'a song'.  No firs...