Short, Sharp Shocks, or Smaller is Better:

As you might recall (no, you don’t. Who’s kidding who? Only I’d recall something like this.) vinyl albums held about forty minutes worth of music. You could fit up to an hour or so, but forty was the average.

So my natural skinflintedness meant that, if for no other reason (other than not having to get up off my ass every 20 minutes to flip it over), I’d love the CD format (about 80 minutes of music per), even if they cost a bit more than vinyl.

Ah, but what if the music is there just to fill up the space? Whereas before artists had to pick and choose only the best of their new songs to fit on vinyl, now they could spread out like those guys sitting on the subway train, with results that could be just as uncomfortable.

So I eventually came to “appreciate” (ie, respect and even enjoy, while still writing to my congressperson about instituting unit pricing on albums) the "short album".

Early rock n’ roll albums were pretty short, mainly because the songs were short. Even twelve of them wouldn’t always hit thirty - let alone forty - minutes.

Songs are just longer now.

Now, if I were to fully embrace my inner (and soon to be outer) grumpy old man and combine it with my natural nerdiness...well, for one thing, I’d end up with one hell of a super-villain.

But I’d also endlessly debate the merits of musical unit-pricing based on songs per dollar vs. minutes per dollar.  I can just see the entire Marvel and DC Universe surrendering to me, on the one condition that I just shut the f*ck up. Now that’s winning, baby!

Anyway, last year’s Puberty 2 by Mitski was pretty short (about 31 minutes) but didn’t feel that way. Not sure if that’s a compliment, but it’s probably because there are eleven songs on it

And this year, I came across a few records that come up short timewise, but not aesthetics-wise.


Cloudburst:


The Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory (2012)

Although it only has eight songs that run 33 minutes it feels complete, and even generous. Now that’s intensity!

This foursome plays aggressive-to-harsh electric guitars a la Parquet Courts but change tone often enough - and add melody enough - to keep it all from beating you down.

There’s even a burst of Feelies drone-guitar in the cheerier-than-average “Fall In”.

The mid 20s singer complains a lot, but his gravelly voice sounds old and vaguely threatening, verging on ugly. And when things get out of hand, they careen out of control and crash.

But they pull themselves out of the ditch and start up again, with guitars propelling them along the way.

A-

"Fall In"



The Harsh Mirror:


Death Cab for Cutie: The Open Door EP (2009)

Damn, I lost focus again and forgot to keep it in the decade!

I have a hard time even saying their name, both for silliness and sheer mechanics. (You try saying it fast.)

And, admittedly it's an EP, not an album. But, like with the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, just let it go.

I had already gotten a taste of Ben Gibbard’s songwriting from Postal Service. And like on that album, his melodies can seem a bit mechanical, as if he plotted them out on graph paper.

What works for it, though - like the atmospherics of Give Up - is the sturdy rocking band behind him.
So the outcome is a little more organic.

And the lyrics are filled with painful self-examination. Not the physical kind.  That comes later in life, boys!

A-

"My Mirror Speaks"




Sweet (and Weird) and Lovely:

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins: Diamond Mine (2014)

 I’ve only had this for about a week, so I should really wait to digest it, but I just don’t want to.

Nutboy recommended this to me a while ago, but I immediately lost his email.  Well, I finally dug it up, and I'm glad I did.

Sweet, quiet, with odd and everyday sounds mixed in. King Creosote provides the former, with a voice so fragile you think it’s going to shatter. Jon Hopkins, who I will talk about in another post, provides the latter, and helps to keep this from going down too easy. Together, they make a Scottish Neil Young.

But you’d better play it early, before the neighborhood noises start to drown it out. Yes, it's that fragile.

But well worth it.

A-

"Your Own Spell"

World History Project: Costco Opera House, Part One

As is usual, I’m lying before I even get past the title (run for president, should I?), because it was probably BJs. And come to think of it, “Opera and BJs” makes for a more interesting title. It certainly catches the eye.

Still, it might have been Costco, but I’m remembering being in a big box shopping hell hole with the wife and then child when we came across the CDs and, what the hell, I also saw Morrissey’s Your Arsenal and REMs Automatic for the People, which Sister Mag was just raving about at the time, and well, you can’t beat those prices, can you?

I’ll probably remember it differently next time.

No, it was definitely BJs (maybe), and so even though all of the above probably wasn’t even the same trip, what it was was that I bought a Ten(!) CD set of Opera Highlights for ten bucks. That’s one buck per opera! (Notice that I saved you from doing the math.) So the price was right. It was similar to when I joined the Musical Heritage Society back when I was young and open minded, and got an eight record set of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies for fifteen bucks. (Always buy your classical music in bulk, I say!)

Actually, I’m suspicious of anything that you can easily purchase in such quantity, but in this case it wouldn’t go bad like that 50 lb. bag of potatoes we thought we would actually cook, or those twin economy boxes of Saran Wrap that I bought when I thought we were running out. (Of course, we weren’t. We were actually running out of tin foil! But that’s another crisis for another post.) Instead, we had a lifetime’s worth of Saran Wrap. And I mean that literally because although it was at least twenty years ago we still haven’t run out.

So I listened to them all ten of them once and then put them away for a very long time. Longer than the potatoes. Every once in awhile they’d come out again, but they never made it to heavy rotation.

But I'm going through the World History Project right now so why not give them a re-listen?

I’m currently stuck in the 1760s, where I’m trying to read, among other things, the Chernow biographies of Washington and Hamilton, and Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon, so I’ll be there for a while. I may never get to Costco again...

Which brings me to:


 
Christoph Willibald Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice (1762)

Not the whole thing, mind you, but good hour’s worth. Remember, it’s Highlights.

So I’ve listened to this dozens of times while I wait to get to to the Revolutionary War.

And it’s pretty good! A nice ratio of singing and playing. And the singing isn’t too melodramatic. In other words, not every operatic, which suits me just fine.

You don’t get that feeling that you’re watching it on PBS on a boring Sunday afternoon, waiting for something to happen, and then when it does happen, you wished it would stop.

I put it on before reading in bed (hence the dozens of times), and still wouldn’t be positive I’d recognize it in any other context.

But it doesn’t cause me to scream and go running for another viewing of Black Orpheus.

So, overall, you could do a lot worse than this one, and I swear if they ever do it at the Met again, I'll go.

But in the meantime, I'll see you Costco. I’ll be the angry one.

B+

“Overture”