Record Reconstructor

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 ...

Dashboard! Eventually I am going to run out of stupid gimmicks to group albums together for listening purposes, but it won't be this week.  This one came together pretty organically (again, planning things ahead of time is antithetical to my process) and originated with a flat tyre on Catherine's bike.  Where she works is only a ten minute drive from our front door, and because we maintain a single car household, if for some reason or another I need the car, she occasionally enjoys cycling to work which is about 30 or so minutes of clean air and exercise.  This week was one of those weeks, and her outbound journey was uninterrupted, but I did get a call from her later that evening when it became apparent her tyre had burst and she couldn't cycle home.  As a result, I also had to drive her in the next morning, and sometimes I just need to snap-pick something to listen to in the car without thinking too hard about it.  We had gone through a period of listening to ...

Dashboard!  When you're looking for a band with an extensive back catalogue to fill a few slots in your ridiculous music listening project, you're really looking for a few traits;  obviously they've got to be relatively old school (there's no 10 album deep Sabrina Carpenter body of work for me to dig into), but also prolific enough to have pumped out a bunch of studio albums under the same name and general band composition, and finally and most importantly, they have to have a relentless ignorance of when their best days are behind them, and keep rolling on producing music despite long having lost any cultural impact or without having much more to say. For me, R.E.M. exist as the poster child for this concept.  This is a band who, in the 1990's, produced at least one album (but maybe as many as three depending on your memory of the time/generosity in awarding them greater status than maybe they really had) that every music fan knew;  based on the sales numbers for A...