On one hand, the brevity of a single song – how compact it is, how succinctly complete it can be – can be a blessing.
On the other hand, my longing lately has been more for the kind of long-form goodness only available to those bands that still care about an album-length work. These works leave transitions in place between songs – make one song reference another – indicate a song’s place within a broader framework. Witness this example from what would be the beginning of Baths’ Cerulean album:
The transition from one track to the other is the loud-soft dynamic in slow motion, one moment showing the strain of long-distance relationships, the next showing the aftermath of the strain, the comedown period. They work exceedingly well together and mostly because they are together and because the artist hasn’t de-emphasized the relationship. This is a coherent pair of songs within a coherent collection of tracks on an album that represents itself as a long-form work. It’s too rare this happens.
But it seems to happen more often with these L.A. hip-hop beat-centric folks:
with the scat lead-in to
and the bass riffage
followed by more bass riffage, which annoyed me at first until I understood the cohesion plus the metallic edge on this one
Frankly, I’ve had just about enough of The Suburbs or I would talk about the references within that album. I think everyone else has had enough of it, too, but I think the point for me is that I must be entering into a get-off-my-lawn phase. Whereas singles seemed to represent the future for me at one point, and whereas I was once OK with that, I am feeling a lot more pride in the parts of my collection that extend beyond 3-4 minutes, the ones where artists have taken the time to compile a theme and create variations on or delve into aspects of that theme. It’s considerably more interesting to me. For someone who likes brevity in other things as much as I do, this is an exceedingly unexpected development. But I suppose it’s time to turn off the shuffle and go back to albums that act like, well, albums.
