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In defence of albums
Back when we released our first single - a CD, which we spent much time and more money than was probably sensible or necessary packaging as beautifully as possible - I couldn’t help noticing how many people were suddenly predicting the imminent demise of the CD single. Bugger. Now, as we’re getting ready to release our first album, I can’t help noticing how many people are predicting the imminent demise of the album. Bugger, again. Clearly, neither of us is ever going to find employment as a futurologist. I don’t know whether to feel exasperated or perversely proud that we’re so chronically out of step with the times.
In the future, as you may have heard, most people will no longer buy a whole album’s worth of music, at least not on a CD. They’ll buy it one track at a time. Yes, if they like it enough they’ll buy a whole album’s worth, track by track (as people have been doing with the new Arctic Monkeys album) but does that technically count as ‘buying an album’? If you’re listening to all those Arctic Monkeys tracks in an order of your choice, or interspersed with other songs on your iPod, does that count as ‘listening to an album’?
It’s been fun reading all the arguments about this, which tend to consist of people lobbing their prejudices at each other rather than saying anything logical. If you’re above a certain age, you rage at people’s fickleness and short attention spans. Are people so full of stress and hurry these days that they can’t even spare one hour to sit and listen to an album from start to finish? If you’re of a certain slightly higher age, you dismiss the fuss over the demise of the CD. Who cares, when it’s such a rip off format anyway? It’s the CD’s fault that people aren’t buying albums any more‚ it allowed albums to become too bloated, too inconsistent, when the right length for an album is the sleek 45 minutes approx that vinyl comfortably allowed. And besides, how does taking a crappy little jewel box home compare with the thrill of a big, exquisitely designed gatefold sleeve?
If you’re below both these certain ages, you wonder what all these daft, ancient people are wittering on about. What’s so great about buying music in a dusty old shop run by Nick Hornby characters? Most album artwork is woeful, on either vinyl or CD. And if you’re that interested in design, there are plenty of painstakingly created websites to marvel at.
I agree with bits of all of the above. I like finding new music on MySpace, track by track (although I like the narcissism and self-promotion dressed up as ‘friendship’ a bit less). I also love big, gatefold vinyl record sleeves, like Dazzleships by OMD or Blue Monday by New Order (add pretty much everything else by Peter Saville, and Mark Farrow too, to that list). Those albums just aren’t quite the same on CD. But I also love certain CD designs, like Very by the Pet Shop Boys (the version in the orange box, that is), and I love going through the little booklets, reading the lyrics and the credits, which is somehow more rewarding with CDs (you can do it on the train, after all, while listening to the music).
Most of all I love albums. Not the ones that are basically some singles and some other songs that aren’t quite as good, but the ones where all the tracks sit together in such a way that they become more than the sum of their parts; where you have to listen to the songs in a particular order otherwise the meaning of the whole becomes different (OK Computer is an obvious example of this; it starts with a car crash and ends with someone saying ‘idiot, slow down’, and there are a few moments along the way that make you think that the whole thing is the fevered hallucination of an accident victim waiting for an ambulance to arrive, but that’s a whole other conversation). When we were making our album, The Regional Variations, a lot of thought went into what would be the opening track, what would close side one (even though there isn’t a side one), what would be the penultimate track, or the final track. Lyrically, too, the closer we got to knowing what music would make it on to the album, the more I deliberately used certain images again and again‚ to the point where Hamish actually told me to stop, otherwise every single song would have had some kind of water metaphor in it, which, given that we’re called Swimmer One, would be gimmicky. He was quite right, as he generally is about these things.
This sort of thing has, sadly, acquired a bad name, that bad name being ‘concept album’. It was a useful description back in the 1960s and early 1970s, I’m sure, when the album was still establishing itself as an artform, but my general feeling is that, these days, if something ends up being labelled a concept album then the chances are it’s fallen short artistically in some way. It means the concept is too conspicuous, clunky or superficial. (Unless you’re Roger Waters or Trent Reznor, and you pride yourself on stating the stunningly obvious as loudly as possible.) I suspect you couldn’t even get away with Sgt Pepper any more. It was hailed as popularising the concept album at the time, but in hindsight the closer you look at it the more shaky the concept becomes - not much more than a fancy cover and a couple of references to Sgt Pepper and his band. This isn’t surprising, given that the Beatles had gone off the whole concept by the time they finished it, but it’s never been an album with anything particularly coherent to say.
One of my favourite albums for a while was Carbon Glacier by Laura Veirs, because it works so well as a package. Veirs wrote Carbon Glacier in Seattle during a winter of what she calls “deep, seeping cold”. The opening song, Ether Sings, is like a welcome and an introduction to the whole thing: “Come with me we’ll head up north where the rivers run icy and strong.” The songs are full of heavy weather in chilly, remote places, themes announced immediately by the titles: The Cloud Room, Wind is Blowing Stars. The artwork - woodcuts of a black, storm-tossed sea‚ complements this very well.
There are subtle connections throughout. The 13 songs all meld into one bigger story about human survival against the force of nature; in the last one, Riptide, she sings about floating in the open sea “here with the shrimp and brine”, maybe dead, maybe metaphorically looking for a direction in which to swim. Pondering that question makes you think afresh about the closing lines in Ether Sings: “Souls lost out to the ether of death come back wise in the eyes and‚ the arms of newborns.” For a while, every time I got to the end I wanted to go straight back to the start. I remember thinking: ‘That’s the kind of album I’d like to make.’ I also remember reading a lot of reviews that shared my enthusiasm, but I don’t remember anyone ever calling Carbon Glacier a concept album.
I write about music (among other things) for a living, so I got to interview Veirs about it. It turns out she studied Buddhism and geology, which explained a lot. She had started out studying Chinese history, but it was ‘too gory’, she said. ‘I couldn’t handle it.” So she switched courses. But after a while learning about rocks, she missed stories about people and found a way to combine the two worlds in her songs, and the place where she’s chosen to live. She liked Seattle, she told me, because “I do feel quite isolated but also surrounded by really creative, brilliant people who inspire me all the time.” It sounded, we agreed, a bit like my chosen home city, Glasgow, a hugely creative place cut off enough from the London media whirl to be a hothouse for artistic experiment, mostly unspoiled by careerism or scrutiny, and which offers a big city buzz less than an hour’s drive from the middle of nowhere. The best of both worlds - people and rocks. Which is maybe why I like Carbon Glacier so much. It transports you to a place a lot like the wilder parts of Scotland, full of mountains and poetry. And I happen to think that, when it comes to music, you can only get this from albums - you need time to drift, be absorbed. If a song is a weekend holiday somewhere, an album is like actually living there for a while. Both have value as experiences, but one is completely unlike the other.
Andrew
