In the beginning.....back in 1955.....

Okay, so maybe it's not 1955, but it's a MUSIC BLOG DAMMIT so it requires lyrics to kick it off!

Welcome to The LOAD Project. LOAD stands for Listening to One Album a Day (and no, it shouldn't actually be LTOAAD because prepositions aren't put into acronyms, so there). The idea for The LOAD Project came out of something I saw on Twitter a while back, where somebody was trying to listen to 365 albums in 2013.

I thought that was a pretty cool idea.

Especially in this modern age, where we are conditioned to cherry pick our musical listening, our musical purchasing....everything to do with music nowadays is about cherry picking. Even down to the concept of the 'album' that most popular artists have churned out since time immemorial, which is three or four radio-friendly hook-laden 'hits' surrounded by the most pathetic filler tracks imaginable. You as the consumer are supposed to buy the 'album' but only for the 'hits', but the advent of iTunes means you can now just cherry pick the hits and never hear the other crap.

Or you can buy a Greatest Hits collection, though if you like ELO, you've only got about 93 Greatest Hits collections to choose from.

I'm guilty of it as well. Frequently my iPod will linger on Sabbath's Snowblind from Black Sabbath Vol.4, but there's no way I'll listen to St. Vitus Dance; or I'm all over Tomorrow Never Knows from The Beatles' Revolver, but if you dare put Dr. Robert on then your arse is getting the hell out of my car.

So I've decided that 2014 is going to be the year that I return to listening to whole albums. The good, the bad and the downright unlistenable. While many of the albums I'll listen to are from my own collection, I am also going to try and branch out to new artists and genres, as well as trying to discover some new music.

So why a blog? Because I fancy myself as some sort of new-fangled Everett True, and I am going to write a review of every single album that I listen to in 2014. Crazy, I know, but I like a challenge. There are some aspects of traditional album reviewing I'll keep, others I'll ditch. At the moment a review will consist of the following:

Title/Artist/Year: seems fairly self-explanatory

Album Comments: comments about the album

Standout Tracks: I'm sure even the shittiest album in history has at least one song that stands out (except maybe Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed, holy shit that album was fucking unlistenable).

Rating: This is one that divides people. How can you ascribe a 'score' to something subjective? 

Easy. By scoring the album (tee hee).

I'll simply work on a 1-5 scale, 1 being OH MY GOD MY EARS KILL THEM NOW to a 5 being absolute musical perfection.

The reviewing is, I'll admit, slightly self-indulgent....but, as you'll find, so is some of the music I'm going to listen to. It will also give me an extra layer of interest in the project especially when listening to new albums and artists.

Let there be rock.

(see what I did there?)   :o)