Exactly what is the problem with The Album as a medium for musical expression in 2006?

and is that maybe good?

i can't listen to one style for too long.

Consumers like albums 'cuz they're predictable and unit-like, and 'cuz they render one's musical tastes (as expressed in purchasing patterns) into a coherent, digestible life-story. Many of us attach relationships, eras, people and emotions to the significant albums of our lives. Albums, if we like them enough, are a sturdy enough platform to support such heavy freight.

Album-length is also, arguably, an ideal canvas for the presentation of music as an artistic statement, given that an album can run between 30 minutes (short LP) and nearly three hours (double CD). That's basically the window in which all non-novelistic art presents itself. Plays, movies, television shows, museum/gallery visits, dance recitals, concerts, short stories, etc. -- all operate between 30 minutes and three hours.

Personally, I'm less intererested in albums than I once was. I'm old and jaded, and am therefore less frequently struck by what I hear. It's rare that music really surprises me, and when it does, I'm generally more taken with outstanding songs than with entire albums. And I just don't feel the need to "own" artists, anymore. I don't have to hear and obsessively pore over everything by this or that artist. A few good tunes, and I'm satisfied.

Finally, the Internet has done a lot to separate music from its format (in my mind, anyway). I listen to a much wider variety of songs than I ever did before, and it's easier to find a couple hours' worth of AMAZING songs trolling around the internet on a daily basis than it is to find two or three great albums a week.

But I still buy 'em. Habit, I suppose. Tithing. Squirrels and nuts.

(on the other hand i have listened to root 70's "plays the music of burnt friedman" about 70 times straight through, and continue to do so; they put a nice twist on the format by making every single song on the album exactly 5:00 long, x12. when you see that shit scroll down an itunes playlist you realize it can't be a coincidence; what's shocking is you never feel that the tracks were all assigned an arbitrary time length, each track takes exactly the time it needs. it just happens to be exactly 5 mins.)

old sod ;)

Nothing wrong with an album over 60 minutes Nick, but that's another argument. I will say this: Different types of albums require varying lengths, and much as DSOTM, Spirit Of Eden and Rock Action keep things nice and concise, there is room in this world for the more scattergun or expansive collections, like The Three EPs or Yanqui UXO.

I know part of it is a hoarding instinct coupled with a resistance to change on my part. I can still remember the excitement of buying news albums by my favourite bands 20 years ago without having heard badly compressed rough cuts from Slsk 3 month beforehand.

I like anticipating new albums. I don't get as excited about individual new songs, except when they're the first single from an upcoming album I've been anticipating.

Nothing wrong with an album over 60 minutes Nick, but that's another argument.

I agree, but making an album 80 minutes long just because you can is plain wrong. We end up with front loaded albums along with a load of filler that in vinyl days would have been lucky to see a b-side of a 4th single.

OTM with the first 3 paragraphs, though.

xpost

They're not pitiful, ilxors are snobs. :-)

;-)

Not exclusively - there are a lot of albums from non-mainstream sources that clearly flout the criticisms made here, and therefore there's no problem with them as a means of artistic expression at all - but I guess mainstream records are the most interesting ones in this discussion, because they inform what the public perceive in terms of the concept of "the album". And what does the public perceive? Why? Are the public still consuming albums? yes, in terms of sales, but how do they then listen to those albums, and why?

vandergraaf or magma killz shuffle w/35 minute "songs"!

Muse's Intro To Apocalypse Now. Bloody hell.

Fortunately, 20 seconds of Muse is followed by Slowdive's Miranda.

More on the Itunes Shuffle Odyssey when it happens...

yeah i guess, i dunno...too much work, it's easier to just cue up and album i like.

What Steve says, Marcello. An iPod is not an evil thing in itself, you don't HAVE to listen on shuffle, and well-encoded tracks with decent headphones still sound wonderful.

ILM's "Requium"

In other words I think a lot of this has to do with the volume of music being produced and the need for artists, first and foremost, to get their albums heard.

The last actual album I liked as an album is one I am forbidden from discussing here.

xpost

My other problem is that if most of an artist's recorded output is albums, you have to wait for a year or more between their releases. An artist should be able to offer something else to the fans who want it - even just "blogging their music" by releasing singles, free downloads, remixes, demos, or whatever on a fairly regular basis until the next record's ready. Staking your whole career on a monolithic, annual-or-worse release doesn't make sense for everybody; a lot of working musicians are always writing stuff and working on stuff, and they should be able to release some of it. People also come at them with lower expectations, which can be helpful. "Proper albums" are judged against your entire catalog, critics and fans are always waiting to say "omg this isn't as good as such and such." But sometimes musicians just want to try out something new.

For a concrete example: a lot of reviews of Sufjan's b-sides album, The Avalanche, including mine, questioned whether it makes sense to release a full-priced, full-length b-sides album anymore when there are so many other ways to use your b-sides - either as singles, or free promotional downloads, or on comps, or just to stay on the radar while you're working on something else.

I came very close to liking the Casper & the Cookies album, which started with a quiet song, then had a run of thematically-linked bangers and then transitioned back into quiet songs, but I think the break was too abrupt and some of the quiet songs weren't very good.

I guess I'm a full rockist then. Wow.

Um, YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE THE SHUFFLE FUNCTION ALL THE TIME, DADDIO. I like some jazz, and I have some on my iPod, although not much because I generally prefer to listen in "real space" rather than via headphones with jazz.

I'm not saying all these bands are fantastically good, but they all describe themselves as prog to some extent and are (mostly) pretty contemporary.

I was at the school of Dido but she left a coupla years before I arrived, which was a great, great, great, great shame. Sort of.

Alumni including KT Tunstall, James Morrison, Katie Melua.

I think this kind of over-stuffing with ego-songs (songs that want to be hit singles, whether they get chosen as singles or not) can make an album very overbearing and lacking in mystery. Back 20 years and Talk Talk and The The etcetera deliberately set out to write one or two songs for an album as singles, and the other 6 or 8 or ten would be, even if melodic and structured with a chorus and hooks etcetera, less overbearingly desperate for radio attention, and quite often written with music and expression in mind rather than I AM A HIT SINGLE IN WAITING.

Groups like Muse etcetera presumably avoid this by being more interested in a different kind of ego-stoke - that of being incredibly respected for being talented, rather than being all over the radio / incidental TV music / football highlights etcetera. The ego-song approach then damages bands like Embrace in terms of the content of their albums because they feel a need to compete, and hence they chuck away all their great album tracks as b-sides, leaving too-eager wannabe-singles on the albums in many cases.

Not to mention Lene Marlin

Sounds exactly like a description of what the likes of Pink Floyd, Yes or even 10cc would often be doing during the 70s.

You're right about the 'all-killer', except that the bands you mention don't understand how to create the truly killer moments, through nuance, surprise and build, and instead rely upon the Great Listening Public to lap up their sanitised, edgeless muck.

The approach I'd most favour is that of bands writing the best album they can muster, and then choosing from it the singles afterwards. I'm not sure how many or which bands DO do this, but it would seem to me to be the best way of testing a band's singles mettle.

xxxxpost

Geir, yeah, and WHO WERE THE BEST BANDS OF THE SEVENTIES?

Those were all close to it, although the best - Genesis - never cared about making singles at all until they ceased being good. :)

I got my first Genesis album yesterday (Selling England...) and I'm not ashamed to say it's really, REALLY good. Geir OTM.

Ah but then you look above and see people talking about getting singles off iTunes precisely so they don't have to deal with the "filler." It's hard to say to yourself, "Ah, this album, I will put 10 songs on it no one will listen to."

That's my brother's thread.

Louis I'm like 8 or 9 years older than you!

geir, i'm curious. out of ALL the new rap and r&b and manufactured pop albums that you have listened to in their entirety this year, which ones, in your opinion, fail as albums? hmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

90% of all skits, regardless of genre, are rubbish (I mean, come on, those American "tourists" apparently visiting the studio during the recording of "The Wall"...) They still work out well to keep the album together though.

question for n southall. "i pop" is a nice pun and that maybe all there is too it but you on occasions seem to link digital music consumption with the empyreal, the throwaway. that article where you lose your hard drive. would "i rock" (lol), "i jazz" or "i improv" (apart from being non puns) make sense?
sometimes i just get the feeling we haven't worked out how to TALK about this stuff yet. Whereas the Classic Album (yr spirit of eden as much as yr revolver) was once the ultimate gauge now perhaps the album will become the connoisseurs thing, maybe it always was.

iPop as I perceive it takes in iJazz, iCountry, iImprov - it's any kind of music, from any genre, that's much more likely to de chopped, diced and randomised via an iPod than played in a pre-ordained context via a CD player or record deck. As such it's both user-and-manufacturer defined / variable. If you chop and dice and randomise Derek Bailey, he becomes iPop (for you), but The Rapture's new album feels like it's been CONCEIVED as iPop for everyone, as if the band, producers, label etcetera all knew that the main way it's gonna get played is vai "shuffle" on the train / bus etcetera.

As for not being able to talk about this stuff yet, damn right. We still don't understand how the internet works yet, don't understand how to use it - we're, evolutionarily, psychologically, toddlers in a brand new playhouse, and it's gonna take at least another generation to come to terms with it as a tool / environment, until it's totally a aprt of everyday life and always has been, so that there's a generation of netheads with kids who are able to experience the net as something that has always existed, both parents and kids. Cos the net's still new to me.