Record Reconstructor

This week: Songs and albums about games, the Queens of the Stone Age discography, and confusing the Spotify algorithm. Well, I was all set to have a quiet weekend when things got thrown out of kilter when a friend's teenage daughter was hit by a car while crossing at a zebra crossing (thankfully she seems to be alright, despite being knocked into the air by the vehicle), which threw into disarray Catherine's plans, which we managed to stitch back together but she was then out all Saturday evening which I spent in turn watching coverage of the increasing tensions between the citizens of Los Angeles and the agents of the Federal Government sent to harass them, and spiralling out on my own, waiting for the escalation into full blown martial law.  Needless to say, the whole affair has left me feeling weirdly unsettled, with misfortunes both foreign and domestic on my mind.  It did make me think of Refuse/Resist by Sepultura who provided this week's article title though. Becaus...

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! 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! 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...