Slackening the pace for a while....

50 reviews in one month is taxing for even the most hardy of mortals, especially if that month is February, and so I'll be taking a breather in March, for two reasons.  First, I have some grad school obligations that include writing a pair of hefty academic papers (one on Yukio Mishima & Theravada Buddhism, and the other on Tamerlane the Great, in case you're curious), plus a hefty reading list for examinations that has me reading at least a couple of novels per week + a few plays and essays and poems that I cram in on the side.  Secondly, reviewing music is a two-part process:  listening and writing.  I'm not the type of reviewer who can listen to an album three times in a row and then compose a review the next day.  I like to give music more of a time to sink in.  Some albums you can write off or proclaim masterpieces after only two or three listens, but as most music falls somewhere in the vast grey between genius and garbage, it can take some time to evaluate a fair opinion.  I started a page for the Go-Betweens, a band whose music is a perfect example of this - if you've read my introduction to that page, hopefully I've explained why throwing on one of their discs and then writing a review the next day is problematic.  Plus, all of the reissues have an insane amount of high-quality bonus tracks - I haven't come close to absorbing the entire 24 tracks on Send Me a Lullaby, and I'd like to review the bands I cover chronologically (ideally; my Cure, Genesis, Hall & Oates, and King Crimson pages are a bit messy at this point).  So I'm going to spend the rest of the month doing a lot more listening than reviewing, in other words.  Not that I'm going to go on hiatus - it's going to be more like an album or two per week, rather than an album or two per day.

And yes, I do plan on eventually reviewing every STUDIO album by the Fall, every which one.  Perhaps completed by 2012, by which time Mark E. should have a couple of new albums out, unless the Mayan sky-gods come back to wreak their vengeance on humanity as the soothsayers predict.