Welcome to Ryan’s Record Reviews!

Hello everyone! “Ryan” Alexander here (better known as OldMusicOnVinyl1), proudly introducing the long-overdue music reviews section of the DayTrippin website, in the making since 2014.

You may or may not be aware that I have been doing interesting, insightful and sometimes amusing reviews of music albums since 2014. As a strong, long-time music enthusiast and passionate writer, I am greatly pleased to say all of the music reviews I will post in the future will go on this centralized, multi-purpose blog

At this point, I will also be migrating most of the 50+ reviews I wrote and published over the years from a remote, New Zealand-based online venue for independent music reviewing – over time, my opinions and tastes have changed, so I may not necessarily hold the same opinion on a certain album as I did, say, 3 years ago.

Moreover, while I HATE to come across as an extreme perfectionist, I’m very picky about details, and some of the old reviews I posted may show a facet of my writing style that, to me, now feels decidedly unsatisfying (or otherwise flippant or hastily written by my current standards), so I may rewrite or alter a few to better suit what I think are the needs and readability level of our current audience.

Just to make something clear: if you have not been as deeply immersed in the music reviewing world as I have, then you may not be aware of what different text colours mean when I reprint track listings. So here’s a brief legend for the uninitiated:

  • RED TRACKS are highlights (stand-out cuts)
  • BLUE TRACKS are lowlights (the duds)
  • COLOURLESS TRACKS are everything in between

Of course, when I talk about what tracks are considered highlights, lowlights and so forth, they are rated relatively by the standard of the album’s artistic merit, i.e. the overall album rating.

Fellow vinyl enthusiasts take note: as it is becoming an increasingly pressing concern in today’s marketplace to receive new vinyl releases that are of disappointing quality, it is my duty to inform record buyers like you about which pressings sound better than others, so that you don’t waste your time and money making the same mistakes I’ve done by purchasing releases that turn out to be of poor quality (either due to other reviewers’ standards being different from mine, or due to there being little, if any, testimonials period).

As much as Ryan’s Record Reviews is a place to give unadulterated critiques on different albums spanning a century’s worth of music history, it is also a place to highlight albums that are superior in the areas of sonics and manufacturing (in my subjective opinion, of course!), covering all the bases of YOUR purchasing decisions, so that you can spend your money more wisely on high-quality releases. In addition, I will also post vinyl sound quality and pressing reviews at HISOnVinyl.com (How It Sounds on Vinyl), a dedicated, thorough database where you can find out the sound/pressing quality of a certain release in one click.

Of course, even when I don’t feel the need to talk about the sound quality at depth, I assign a star rating to an album’s sound quality in addition to just the album critique rating, so that audiophiles have a better idea of what to expect when they choose to check something out (particularly if it’s the exact pressing that I have on hand to listen to the album, and the pressings I own of each of the albums reviewed will be assigned their respective links to the Discogs database, to which I am a deep contributor).

And that’s it! Join me on my journey as I discover and revisit albums old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, and provide valuable opinions to the music world for years to come.

–“Ryan” Alexander, February 15, 2018

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