Record Reconstructor

  This week:  Songs to be annoyed at work to, new releases, a listening project grab bag, tangential discussion of tennis, and finally settling whether The Strokes are better than The Beach Boys. I swear each of these posts is not going to be me making excuses for not listening to 30 albums a week, but if you've noticed a slow-down in my consumption rate for the past couple of weeks, that is both based on the shoulder injury I suffered being manly last week (mostly pain free now and seems to have fixed itself, thanks for asking), but also because we've just concluded two weeks of Wimbledon tennis coverage, an annual event which sees Catherine and I glued to our sofa for much of our free time during that fortnight because we love tennis and it only happens once per year.  We've been playing Tennis together for probably nearly a decade now, somehow I have accidentally ended up on the Board of Directors for the tennis club we are members of*, and we play together in the Mixe...

This Week: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Chvrches, Wet Leg I spent the evening with our friends last night watching the Eurovision finals and while I am not going to talk about the show because I know at least one person who hasn't watched it and intends to do so, I mention it in the context of me having a very low grade hangover not helped by staying up till 1.30am last night and then having to get up at 7.30am this morning to go play a Tennis match.  This is my way of saying that this is going to be a mercifully short wrapup this week, in part because I have been listening ahead to albums by a band I am going to cover next week and I am only half way through, so I won't be writing about those, and because I already covered a lot of my listening last week in my previous two articles. Apart from that, no major news to report.  Catherine is getting ready to go away to the Scottish island I would like us to relocate to permanently as part of my plan to ride out the global and national ascend...

This week:  Midlake, Self Esteem, Lady Gaga, Imogen Heap, RAYE, Wet Leg, illuminati hotties, Annie Lennox I've had this paranoid feeling for the past couple of weeks that less people read the weekly catchup posts because I don't post the image of what other bands I listened to in the header art.  Why this bothers me, or why I am changing the format a bit to make it more obvious what other bands were included in an attempt to modify the behaviours of the handful of people reading this is obviously completely unhinged.  I would be more successful just DMing the people I know who read this and tell them not to skip over the weekly summaries.  However, I've done it now and I'm probably not going back - whether I can be bothered to go back and update all the other weekly summaries remains to be seen. A few things happened this week;  I've written on a few occasions about my running discomfort with letting giant tech companies be the only conduit through which I can l...