Pizza-sized but straight to the point
Apart from the crap jewel cases, the liner notes you need an electron microscope to read and the inevitably self-destructing indestructible support, there's one thing about CDs that really, really bugs me. They're too long.
Vinyl LPs were the perfect length. Let's face it, forty-ódd minutes of anyone's music is nearly always enough to take in at one go (except when it's not, which is where double albums come in), and I can't think of any CD-era album I own that wouldn't benefit enormously from the judicious culling of its two or three weakest tracks.
So, what might Elbow's The Seldom Seen Kid have looked like if this was 1978?
Side One:
Starlings (5:04)
Mirrorball (5:49)
Grounds for Divorce (3:39)
An Audience with the Pope (4:27)
Side Two
Weather to Fly (4:28)
The Fix (5:14)
The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver (4:27)
One Day Like This (6:33)
Now wouldn't that have been even more of a corker? ("The Bones of You" and "Some Riot" would have been the very creditable B-sides of the two singles, while "Friend of Ours" would have been a rarely performed song, much treasured by those lucky enough to have tracked it down on a bootleg cassette of a legendary show at the De Montfort Hall, Leicester.)
So, any more for any more retroactive sequencing exercises? (The only rule: maximum 22 minutes per side.)
[Fraser: If the animated gif causes gears to creak and groan, please go ahead and eat it.]
[Fraser edit: Thanks. I've replaced your pizza with a home-made one of my own, one a little more palatable to the wheezing Word server.]
- More from Archie Valparaiso.
- Login or register to post comments
Pretty much any Frank Black album
could be roughly cut in half and be a cracker.
How about "Teenager Of The Year" - from the original 22 tracks down to this:
Side One
1. Abstract Plain
2. Calistan
3. Vanishing Spies
4. Speedy Marie
5. Freedom Rock
Side Two
1. Headache
2. Ole Mulholland
2. I Could Stay Here Forever
4. Superabound
5. Space Is Gonna Do Me Good
6. Thalassocracy
Elephant
by the White Stripes
Side One
1. Seven Nation Army
2. Black Math
3. There's No Home For You Here
4. I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself
5. Ball and Biscuit
Side Two
1. The Hardest Button To Button
2. Hypnotize
3. The Air Near My Fingers
4. Girl You Have No Faith in Medicine
5. Well It's True That We Love One Another
I have discovered
That Revolver is the perfect door-to-door length for my walk to work if I skip Yellow Submarine but play And Your Bird Can Sing twice to make up for it. I suggest that this is 'an album which is not too long, but should still be made shorter, and can be my repeating parts of itself'. Catchy.
too true
I always give 'And Your Bird Can Sing' a second airing
Be Here Now
1. Do You Know What I Mean
2. My Big Mouth
3. I Hope I Think I Know
4. Fade In Out
1. Be Here Now
2. All Around The World
3. It's Getting Better Man
Be Here Now?
1.
2.
3.
4.
1.
2.
3.
That's more like it....
I knew
as I was typing that last one, that someone would do exactly that!
Only joking..
...I'd love to hear Oasis' works trimmed down to old fashioned lengths; I think it would suit them; lean mean and skinny.
Down to a t.
A 10 track Greatest Hits would suit Oasis to a t. Likewise Blur.
I still maintain
that there is a decent album in Be Here Now "if" re-recorded with the aid of the "snow"
Theory
I think one of the reasons that records like "Astral Weeks" and "Moondance" are held in such high esteem is because they're short. We listen to them a few times and we've got an idea of them in our heads.
Less is always more
This thread links up quite nicely with the 'Seldom Seen Kid' 'classic or not a classic?' thread. I'd put it in the not a classic bucket as at just short of an hour its about 20 minutes too long. Back in the day if an album didn't comfortably fit on one side of a TDK90 it was treated with great suspicion. It was problematic and didn't fit in. The same criteria still applies. Artists need to step back and think a bit more. To quote George Bernard Shaw - "I'm sorry I've written such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write a short one".
The C90 model is the ticket.......
But there is also the severe feeling of short changing when sides crept to below 15 minutes, almost the norm for Nashville. A record that fits on a C60 is not always more, they were designed more for Radio 1 "In Concert" progs.......
Radiohead - In Rainbows
I think one of the reasons that I love this album is that it doesn't outstay its welcome. 10 tracks at just under 39 mins. Just like the old days and my most played album this year.
Ps. Archie. Fantastic picture thingamabob.
What !
No anchovies ?
I think someone's spiked my Quattro Stagioni...
There's a pulsating pizza on a record deck...
I'm off for a lie down...
I'm not sure
Elbow would have released a mere 8 track album in 1978 though. If they did, and then put out two singles from it it would be considered jolly bad form.
Mellan Collie.....
....and the Infinite Sadness by Smashing Pumpkins. Possibly the only example of a really long album, being really good. Apart from Exile on Main St of course. Long live the double album with gatefold sleeve!
Ladies & Gentlemen...
... We Are Floating In Space by Spiritualized is an album I've been happily reacquainting myself with lately thanks to a longer commute into work, but by God it would be 100% better if there was 30% less of it, not by skipping tracks, but just by making most of them 1 or 2 minutes shorter and ditching the lapses into feedback. Purists will scoff of course, but in the spirit of this thread, to me these are just musical longeurs I could easily do without, and would make the whole thing a lot more digestable...
btw Fraser
I'm sure that was a delicious pizza, but as it spins above I see maggots writhing.
Born to Run
Perfect, perfect, perfect AND you still get 8:41 worth of Jungleland!