About 18-months ago I made a commitment to myself to spend more time listening to full albums — both new, and old. The nature of BlackPlastic.co.uk is that I naturally spend a lot of time listening to singles. If I’m not careful, this can lead to me missing out on the widescreen scope of a great album, and so I made a pact to myself — every week I would try to commit to listening to an album, at least a few times, to get under (or back under) the skin of it. I can’t say I’m always successful — work and family can sometimes take up my time (and realistically, energy and headspace), and I suddenly realise I have gone a week or two without doing it. Still, I listen to more albums than I did a few years ago, and in that sense it has been a successful personal commitment.
A few months ago, I was making a regular trawl of LinkedIn when something caught my eye — someone I used to work with had launched a website called Sound Club, positioned as like book clubs, but for albums. Having browsed the site for a bit, I decided I would start my own club, focused on music released between 2000 and 2010, at the intersection of dance and rock culture. I named it Disco Pogo For Punks In Pumps, honouring the late and great Jockey Slut (though that crew recently went on to launch a follow-on zine, simply called Disco Pogo — it’s great).
Since then, on a semi regular basis, I’ve stuck an album on for the listening pleasure of a small group of followers, and generally written a bit about why I think it is interesting and worth a listen. Sometimes there is discussion, sometimes there isn’t, but I always enjoy re-listening to an album, and writing about it.
This week, my club has been featured by Sound Club, and so I want to share it. I’m also planning to start sharing the posts I make there over here, on BlackPlastic. That serves two purposes — a bit of healthy cross-promotion, but also ensuring the writing both lives on, and helps to highlight albums that deserve to be highlighted once again. The current album on the club is The Juan Maclean’s Less Than Human, and I will share the write-up shortly. In the meantime, go and check-out the club here — sign-up to the site, join the club, and let me know what you think of whatever album is playing at the point when you dove in!