29 & 30 June 2013 – Half Time

Sunday 30 June marks half time in my project.  Six months of blogging completed with another 6 months to come.  It should be more than enough time to play some of my very favourite albums and think of a new project for 2014. 

There was precious little time available for listening and all I got to hear was:

(#484) Outkast – Stankonia (2000)

This is regarded as one of the all time great rap/hip hop albums.  I can see why.  It is an expansive record that takes in a wide range of musical styles and sources and an array of mostly discovered talent.  Brilliantly sequenced, it starts of in a rush with Gasoline Dreams, and culminates in a brilliant sequence of psychedelic influenced tracks including Toliet Tisha, Slum Beautiful and the title track.  And yet, it lacks one explosive gigantic global hit or two to give it the proper recognition it deserves.  Pity that their subsequent album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is this album in reverse (that is, containing the huge break out singles but lacking the overall conception of this).

(#485) Nada Surf – The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy (2012)
(#486) Nada Surf – The Dulcitone Files (2012)

Nada Surf is an alternative rock band from New York that’s been around now for 18 years and yet this is just their sixth album.  It consists of 10 tracks of guitar driven melodic rock/power pop which reminds you of some of the best practitioners in the field over their lifetime, such as Matthew Sweet circa Altered Beast, Superchunk and prime era Lemonheads.  The best tracks on this come early on.  The opener, Clear Eye Clouded Mine, is noisily melodic and Waiting For Something and Jules And Jim are nice straight ahead poppier numbers.  Let The Fight Do The Fighting adds trumpet to the template with  good results.  The Dulcitone Files is a bonus disc containing acoustic versions of half the album that demonstrates the songcraft sitting behind the numbers.  Perhaps some of these could havwe been included in the main album proper for greater variety?

So just what I achieved so far this year?  Counting the albums I’ve played on the weekend I have in the first 6 months of the year:

A] listened to a total of 486 albums spread out across 515 CDs.  Assuming a minimum of 10 tracks per CD, that would equal approximately  5150 tracks which, assuming 50 minutes  per disc, equates to an estimated listening time of 429 hours .

B] listened to a further 218 tracks spread out across 4 iPod Shuffle sessions, which at an estimated 5 hrs per session  equates to an estimated listening time of 20 hours .

C] attended a total of 6 gigs in which the headliners played a total of 115 tracks (for an estimated time of 9 hours) , and

D] viewed a total of 18 music related DVDs, TV broadcasts or documentaries, which at an average of 80 minutes per item results in 22 hours and 40 minutes of viewing .

Thus, adding together the approximate amount of tracks and listening/viewing time, we get:

	Estimated number of tracks	Estimated time spent
A	5150	429 hours 10 minutes
B	218	20 hours
C	115	9 hours
D		22 hours 40 minutes
	Total of: 5483 tracks & 18 a/v items	Total of: 480 hours and 50 minutes

And none of this takes into account reading time and time spent on writing the blogs for this project, although, if anything, my reading time has directly decreased in proportion to my writing time.

Somehow, these figures just don’t seem enough.  I must do better.  I will do better.