(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. In mid-July he delivered Issue One (which you can find here), earlier this month he presented Issue Two (here), and now we have Issue Three encompassing reviews of four records released in March, April, May, and August.)

Over the years I’ve noticed a sort of lethargy develops when I reach the end of some sort of media consumption or project completion. The ‘Done-ness’ of it all seems to take it out of me and I wind up strangely tired for the rest of the day. I notice this more often with my videogame hobby than most, as I’ll often reach the end of some game I’ve been playing my way through – often side by side with the many albums I take a swing at writing about – and wind up tired by the end of it.

I once saw someone positing that it’s a sort of decompression, because your brain has been interacting so long with that specific ‘world’ that it is a sort of loss now that it’s over. I’ve found I do the same thing with albums and books too; albums in an equally odd circumstance because I often wind up writing about them afterward, like putting a neat little bow on a story arc and tying it off. I then walk away from the writing part of it just as tired, such that every review after a while feels like an exorcism.

The difficult part, then, is that what I should be doing is getting started on the next thing, because your writing skill is an engine that if you let rust from disuse becomes harder and harder to start up each time. Yet, keeping the machine rolling runs against my long-simmering philosophy of not just completely severing ties with any particular piece of art, because the practice of continual writing and reviewing so easily becomes more of a high score board of ‘look how much I listened to!’ It all feels surface-level at that point. Did you really listen to it if you’ve got 150 other releases on your docket for this month? Or does it count at about the same level as the music playing in your local supermarket for all of the effect it had on you? Continue reading »