"a good album that could've been a great EP"

i remember someone said this about the first burial album, maybe here?

agreed, this is stupid. pick any album that has a few decent songs and a few not decent songs.

a good EP that could have been a great single!

a good single that could have been a great ring tone!

a good song that could've been a great skit!

"a good melody that could've been a great note!"

i guess music critics have yet to discover the benefits of the http://www.microsoft.com/library/media/1033/windowsxp/images/using/setup/maintain/67396-delete-key.jpg key.

I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out when an album with good songs has songs that suck, nor do I think "it's an iPod world now, just keep the songs you like" is really a good response. I'm just saying, the EP jab is a a really tired trope.

my problem with the "good album/great EP" thing is that it assumes that the artist purposefully put bad songs on their album (which i'm sure is the case sometimes, but maybe the artist really likes the songs you don't like) and assumes that the bad tracks are universally known as bad tracks, rather than the sole opinion of the reviewer.

what i was saying obtusely w/ the delete thing, is that if you honestly believe that the album will make a "great EP" then go ahead and make the damn EP yourself. i don't think "i'm giving my hand-picked EP a 10.0 and i really didn't mind trashing all these other songs" is a valid criticsm but i mean being able to delete songs is a luxury the ipod age has afforded us. if this is all about enjoying the music- and not "objectively" scoring an album- then i don't get why said person wouldn't just make their own ep and play that shit on loop if it would be "great".

my problem with the "good album/great EP" thing is that it assumes that the artist purposefully put bad songs on their album (which i'm sure is the case sometimes, but maybe the artist really likes the songs you don't like) and assumes that the bad tracks are universally known as bad tracks, rather than the sole opinion of the reviewer.

this is pretty much OTM.

yeah I kinda made the same argument recently when Kevin John Bozo was harping on the concept of "filler" as if artists/labels are constantly intentionally writing 5 great songs and then just saying "ok call the c-list songwriters and tell them not to try too hard". (xpost)

my problem with the "good album/great EP" thing is that it assumes that the artist purposefully put bad songs on their album (which i'm sure is the case sometimes, but maybe the artist really likes the songs you don't like) and assumes that the bad tracks are universally known as bad tracks, rather than the sole opinion of the reviewer.

But the critic might not be assuming that the artist put bad songs on the album, but rather arguing that there are bad songs on the album. Whether that argument is "universally" persuasive depends on how good the argument is. Good criticism (and there is some) involves more than just assumptions.

But the critic might not be assuming that the artist put bad songs on the album, but rather arguing that there are bad songs on the album.

saying "this would have made a great EP" inherently states that you think there are shit songs on the album. but arguing that only the good songs should have been released while the bad ones scrapped is not the same as saying "there aren't good songs on the album".

anyway, the pretty basic idea of this thread is otm. it's just really fucking lazy (and kind of smug, tbh) to say "too bad this isn't an EP".

yeah if the point of the thread is to point out that this is a lazy cliche for a critic to use, then I agree.

another thing is, maybe people want to hear bad songs even if you (i've been using you as to mean proverbial reviewer, btw) think they're bad and even if they turn out to be bad. for instance, most ppl panned the mellotron track on the last strokes album, and it turned out to be pretty awful, but i still was v. interested in hearing it. i would have been kinda sad if they had kept it on the cutting room floor because it wasn't one of the top 4 songs, because i wanted to hear what their mellotron track sounded like. bad songs can still be interesting.

But the critic might not be assuming that the artist put bad songs on the album, but rather arguing that there are bad songs on the album

Except "could've been a great EP" implies that someone could have made it a great EP, and that someone is usually the artist (or the record company or whoever).

honestly the "[double album] would've been better/more consistent as a single album" thing is even worse than this simply because of the NO SHIT SHERLOCK obviousness of saying it. especially nowadays, when making a double album is pretty much always an intentional attempt at something overreaching and bloated rather than "we really thought all 30 of these songs are as good as the 12 on our last album".

i don't really see what the artist's intent has to do with it. of course they probly think all the songs are good. what does that have to do with the critic's job?

because saying "this good album could have been a great EP" brings intent into the discussion.

i wrote this once. in a review of power windows, for my high school paper. i don't think i've used it since. (or well actually i think i wrote it was a mediocre album that could've been a good EP. which i still think is true in re power windows.)

and you just know that if a label ever told an artist who just turned in an album "most of these tunes aren't to snuff, we're just going to take the good ones for an EP," fans/critics would howl with protest and beg the artist to find some other way to release the leftovers.

because saying "this good album could have been a great EP" brings intent into the discussion.

-- J0rdan S., Monday, November 12, 2007 7:23 PM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

look it's just a cute way of saying that an album has a big disparity in quality between its good and bad songs. you don't have to read that much into it.

(which, of course, would never happen because EPs are generally much easier to market and profit from on the label's end) xpost

are you guys intentionally being insanely literally-minded as a joke or something?

no it's a fucking dumb thing to say. and it's not "cute." esp. since it's been used in a billion review over the years.

there are much "cuter" ways of saying "there is a disparity between good songs and bad songs" than implying that the artist should have released an ep instead.

it is just a cute rhetorical device, but the reason it's more risible than most cute rhetorical devices is that it raises a big, misleading question about how the artist made the songs and decided to release them in the form that they did. (xpost)

i dont think ANYONE is being fooled by it.

it's just a cliche, is all. whether it's defensibly accurate in any given situation doesn't excuse the laziness of the phrase. whoever the first person was who said it, it might've sounded mildly clever. but that was probably in 1968 or something.

prague spring and all

on the flipside, a critic saying that a novel would've been better as a short story or a feature would've been better as a short film might actually have a point about the nature of the story or the way it's being told. music critics can't really make that argument in the same way (unless they're saying that "A Quick One While He's Away" is better than Tommy or something).

prague spring and all

good season, would've been a great month.

on music vs literary criticism: I dunno, a really creative music critic could pick apart a set of songs, and talk about the ideas in those songs, and how these ideas would have better been used to write different songs, but that there would only be enough songs for an EP then. This isn't what's usually meant by music critics who use this cliche; as J0rdan S has said, they usually just mean delete some number of the songs.

There a similar sensibility at work on The thread where you turn an average double LP into an amazing single LP by removing half the songs.

yeah i actually participated in that thread! like i said, it's not an unreasonable impulse, just a trope that needs to be retired or expressed better.

they are SO RONG about andrew wk, aside from it needing the song from the jackass soundtrack also

we should exchange this cliche for "they should have not put an album out until they'd written five more good songs."

this is a good thread, but it couldve been a great couple posts

no filler next time guys

max OTM

sometimes an EP is all thats really needed though. i wouldnt mind if the EP became a more popular format, especially as album making seems to be so hard for a lot of artists. and if no one should care about that anymore because hey, everyone can just press 'delete', then artists/labels shouldnt bother releasing albums anymore and should just release songs in random order at random times and leave us to make our own versions.

i wouldnt mind if the EP became a more popular format, especially as album making seems to be so hard for a lot of artists.

i definitely agree, i'd love to see more EPs released. thinking about that motivated me to search for this thread: Taking Sides: EPs vs LPs. Some interesting points there. A bit different discussion though from this thread, which is obv more about the particular writing cliche.

I like the idea of releasing EPs at a frequent clip instead of LPs every couple years, but if I ever got around to releasing records I don't think I'd actually do it that way (mostly because you kinda have to include the "EP" suffix on the artwork or at least the promotional materials to be clear about the nature of the release, which is awkward and annoying and not at all necessary w/ full length albums).

the myspace page 4-song sampler has sort of revived the EP concept.

(in a virtual/digital way, obv)

in a very annoying 'player takes 100 years to load up' way.

i pretty much hate listening to music in myspace.

despite it being a great way to hear new stuff.

The Beatles: "Please Please Me" and "Beatles For Sale".

Stop picking on the AV Club, guys!

(and that version of Graduation still sucks)

Q: How long until posts appear naming albums that people actually think would make great EP's
A: Oh look, Geir's here.

hahahaha when was the last time geir actually read a thread before posting to it?

The Onion AV Club article this week about this is TERRIBLE, and epitomizes the reasons why some people hate this metaphor - it boils down to really inane, one-sided readings of what a given album is "supposed" to be or "is good at," so you get I Get Wet without "I Love NYC," New Adventures In Hi-Fi without, well, almost everything... there's nothing wrong with having the opinion that these albums are mostly filler or bad or whatever, but it runs directly against the entire attitude of getting to know and love an album including the stuff that isn't immediately gripping on first listen. That path may tend towards rockism/albumism, but it's also the whole essence of saying "I Love Music" as opposed to "i sorta like some songs."

oh jeez I didn't even get far enough to see the EP version of Graduation, that really is terrible. I also hadn't noticed that Matos contributed to the article, maybe he'd like to defend the concept or whichever choices he pared down albums for. or maybe not, this is a pretty obnoxious thread.

They're wrong about Tres Hombres. Precious and Grace is a great song.

they are RONG about Whigs 1965 too.

I don't really get how a # of songs measurement can be a cliche.

I'll just add that the eds refused to let me write about Who's Next and leave it at that.

there's nothing wrong with having the opinion that these albums are mostly filler or bad or whatever, but it runs directly against the entire attitude of getting to know and love an album including the stuff that isn't immediately gripping on first listen. That path may tend towards rockism/albumism, but it's also the whole essence of saying "I Love Music" as opposed to "i sorta like some songs."

yes, that's exactly what it is. bravo.

"in order to really love music, you need to love the shitty songs on uneven albums." I can't thank you enough for pointing out this essential truth.

haha "I guess I'll leave it at that."

lol i wasn't gonna say but

how about "a good EP that could've been a great album"?

any ideas for that one?

I have an encyclopedia that could've made a great entry.