Another (mile)stone in the wall...

     Any of you who've been reading the blog for a while might well have noticed that I like to commemorate things. Holidays and special occasions, album releases, good days, bad days... any of them can (and indeed should) be celebrated with music. You'll also, I have little doubt, be familiar with the fact that I sometimes like to acknowledge the passing milestones that line the twisting trail that is Loud Noises from day one to today.

     As such, I'd like to take the briefest of moments to celebrate another recent milestone in Loud Noises history: sometime during last week's climb out from behind the eight ball, I passed one thousand posts. Small wonder, I hear you say, given that you post a song every day. But take a second and do the math: even at a rate of a song a day, 1000+ posts represents almost three years of work.

     This is an entirely appropriate number at which to arrive, since Loud Noises will be three years old in May, and the Song of the Day feature will be three in July. As these anniversaries approach, I'm still undecided as to where I might go with things in the future, but at the same time, looking back on more than a thousand Loud Noises posts, I feel pretty satisfied on the whole with where I've been so far.

     So put on something you dig, hoist skyward a glass of something strong, and join me in saying here's to more than a thousand posts worth of good music, metal and otherwise.

    

     (One other thing, while I'm being all retrospective and such: some of you may have noticed the disappearance of the Album of the Week feature (or not), and perhaps even lamented its demise. Recommending more than just songs is an idea I really like, not least because I'm a staunch believer in the importance of the album, rather than the single, as the fundamental unit of delivery for any music worth listening to.

     But I kept missing week, or being late, or changing the day of the week I posted the album (ie: I kept on doing what I do) so a while back I quietly decided to simply stop doing Albums of the Week. Rest assured, however, that I haven't completely abandoned the idea, even if it's another while before I return to it.

     For the time being, I will say only this: if you like a song by band X, check out the rest of the record, in order, from start to finish. The band and those involved with the album's recording made deliberate decisions to do things the way they did, to order the songs the way they did, etc., and sometimes they actually know what they're talking about...)