During a long drive a few weeks ago, I felt the need for some Black Dahlia Murder*. I queued up Miasma, but after two songs, I decided I didn’t want to listen to that album. I queued up Necropolis, but the same thing happened. Then it happened with Ritual, and I gave up. I realized that I didn’t actually want to listen to any Black Dahlia albums. I really only wanted to listen to a few select tracks.
Based on the Recording Industry of America’s (RIAA) sales data, my desire to only listen to certain songs is not unusual. The RIAA data seems to show that most consumers only want a few songs from an album. In other words, they want the singles and the crème de la crème drawn from pop music’s bottomless wells. This mentality makes me wonder if the big names in pop music have as many fans as they think. Can someone really be a fan of a band or album if they only listen to two songs?
I cannot think of a discussion in person or on any message board where metalheads expressed that same singles/best of mentality. Metalheads want to listen to albums, not songs. I feel the same way about music: I listen to the album. However, there are some bands that can’t seem to string a good album together. Black Dahlia Murder’s one of them. I might not be a fan of the band, but I’m definitely a fan of some of their songs.
After I got home from that drive, I realized that I wanted to cherry pick Black Dahlia’s albums to make a best-of list. Normally, I don’t make best-of playlists. The payoff’s just not there, and the great albums all deserved to be listened to as such anyway. For Black Dahlia Murder, however, the process made sense. All of their albums have at least one killer song. Cherry picking their discography allows me to enjoy their music on my terms, not theirs.
I selected my Black Dahlia tracks, and came up with the following album-length list:
1. When the Last Grave Has Emptied
2. I’m Charming
3. Flies
4. A Vulgar Picture
5. Novelty Crosses
6. What a Horrible Night to Have A Curse
7. Death Panorama
8. Malenchantments of the Necrosphere
9. Deathmask Divine
For me, that’s the perfect playlist. Later on, I cherry picked other bands’ discographies: Carnal Forge, Brainstorm, and Dimmu Borgir. I’m not a fan of those bands, but I like some of their songs, usually one to three per album. Cherry pickin’ works because it allows me to edit the band’s discography, thus saving space on my iPod and allowing me to listen to the hits without fumbling through tracklists.
Have you encountered a band that you don’t necessarily like, a band that can’t seem to write a good album, and yet teases you with a few cherries on each album?
*Technically, they are called The Black Dahlia Murder. I refuse to call them that because it’s awkward to speak and read.
. . .
My job allows me the opportunity to listen to a lot of music while I work, so I do something similar and create long playlists for if/when I really want to hammer a band for a long period of time.
But for TBDM (so much easier to type) I do things in an opposite manner to you, I simply make a playlist de-selecting the songs I don’t like. For me their disco is more about great albums with a few weaker tracks (with the last 3 at least), plus a mix of killer/filler (primarily for Miasma). We seem to be at odds on this.
So in short, I do something similar.
I do this with KISS but it ends up more like an EP…
Any Lamb of God starting with Sacrament to the current release. I always like 3 – 4 songs and the rest seems like filler.
Dude, come on. Why are you even listening to anything LOG post-Ashes of the Wake? As the Palaces Burn and New American Gospel are really all the Lamb Of God one needs. Maybe Killadelphia if you’re like having a bonfire party and you run out of whiskey and you’re bored so you start shooting guns at the fire. That’s when live albums are usually best, but I’d probably opt for Unleashed In the East at that point anyway.
Their best song is on Wrath. There is a lot of good LoG post Ashes, it’s just vastly outweighed by crap.
I’d do the same, but from “Palaces” to “Ashes”. So yeah, two albums. After that it’s Pantera worship gone death-metal or something. Pre-Palaces, I’m just ignorant of.
Yes, more and more I’ve found that my listening tastes are going this way. I’d probably save myself some money also by just buying the songs that I do like, but at the same time, I’ve still got the mentality that maybe the rest of the album just hasn’t had enough time to resonate with me yet, and I’ll appreciate it more later (typically this doesn’t happen). I could also save myself some iPod/Phone space this way, but it seems to be a tedious process to go through a large library to do that (more tedious than just hitting the skip button). It may be worth a try though. The more I consider it, there’s only a few select artists (Death, Opeth, Darkthrone, Katzenjammer, just to name a few) that I do listen to the whole album with, and it is getting to be a little disappointing to purchase highly anticipated albums that eventually you gravitate towards only a couple of songs.
I think deconstruction is sort of the bottom gear for all artistic intake–it’s where you get the least done, but it’s completely necessary, and the only place to start. So in that sense, gravitating to a few select tracks is very natural. I often do this, because seldom will i get an uninterrupted 40 minute streak of listening pleasure.
Whoever mentioned Lamb of God above, VERY true on Sacrament and beyond.
As for your playlist, no “I Will Return?” It’s their finest hour!
He lost me when he forgot to include “Statutory Ape”
My playlist consists of the majority of Nocurnal, a good chunk of Deflorate, a reasonable dose of Ritual, a minimal serving of Miasma (3/4) and a smattering of “Unhallowed” tracks.
I know the debut is some sort of holy grail to some people, and I enjoy it for it’s scrappy, underdog status, but really, the playing and the song-writing, and the awesome solo-ing, have only got better over time.
I recently tried this for Mortuus-era Marduk and was suprised how few tracks I actually had to cut. Also that I apparently like “Plague Angel” more than “Rom 5:12″, when I was certain it was the other way around.
Whenever I get a new CD, first thing I do is load it on my ipod, since pretty much all my listening is on the go. As I listen, any tracks that jump out as less worthy are marked, and next time I plug in my ipod I nuke those songs. It keeps the playlist lean and mean, and it has a similar effect as the approach taken in the article, but is a bit less focused.
Should’ve “queued” up Unhallowed and skipped yourself the hassle of being inspired to write this piece.
Did you see that I have a track from Unhallowed in my playlist? Inspiration was going to strike in one way or another. I didn’t need to namecheck your favorite TBDM album for it to happen.
I seen you had “Last Grave” is emptied. But Unhallowed is solid from beginning to end, even if it does peak at track 3 (I think) with “Elder Misanthropy.” But something happened post-Unhallowed. They like got a sense of humor or something. Sucks.
Unhallowed is certainly solid, but I’d say that’s true of any TBDM album. If I make it thru a TBDM album, it’s always Nocturnal or Miasma.
They did develop something of a sense of humor – statutory ape, for example. Also, a terrible night to have a curse is a direct reference to one of the Castlevania games. Forget which, probably Symphony of the Night.
Absolutely it’s acceptable. Some bands’ just don’t have the chops/ticker/whatever to produce consistent albums. Can you be a “fan” if you only like a couple of songs? I would reluctantly say…probably.
Owning any BDM record just seems pointless, they are mediocre across the board…when did Carcass and Entombed become not good enough to warrant the existence of this band???
Tool is the ULTIMATE eexample here…deleting the German cookie recipes, fake voicemail threats, and other goofy nonsense and pairing Aenima down to 8 songs makes it perfect.
Otherwise, I generally stopped buying records by bands who can’t write more than 3 good songs per album years ago…I’ve saved a ton of cash not wasting time or money on medicrity, which makes up the bulk of Metal Blade’s current roster!
Agree on the general point, but it’s funny you should name Tool: reading the original post, I immediately thought of Tool as the classic example of an ALBUM-band. Especially Lateralus and 10.000 Days are way better as an album than any single song on them. Aenima too, IMO. But yeah, I do skip the bullshit skits in between the songs. That is more of a 90s thing than a Tool thing, though.
This is almost exactly my BDM playlist too. I totally understand. I love those songs, but I could never listen to Ritual all the way through ha!
As a skateboarder, quite a number of songs from various skate videos have ended up in my music collection over time. On occasion this leads to me finding a band whose other work I end up enjoying just as much, but more often than not it’s just the ’single’ that sticks with me. I have a skate playlist where the songs tend to be classic rock/pop, but when it comes to metal I find I’m the exact opposite.
The majority of my ‘quality’ listening time over the last several years has been my car ride to and from work, and almost without exception I’ll just throw on a full album and won’t change the selection until the album is over. I find that over time this allows me to find all the little ‘easter eggs’ in metal songs that are sometimes only apparent after multiple rounds of intent listening. Even if there songs that are weak, I usually won’t skip them.
I’ve always wondered too though, when I look through iTunes and see bands where the popularity rating for one or two songs is through the roof and then near-zero for everything else on the album, does anybody actually care about this band? There’s definitely a lot of good things that come along with the hit single, but it must be frustrating on some level for an artist where the audience just shouts out the name of the single between songs.
I’m still very much an album guy, which I’m guessing can be attributed to a combination of growing up in the late 70s /1980s and listening to a lot of bands that never had singles on the radio. I figure if a band can’t bother to put together a coherent, well-sequenced album that works from start to finish, then they’re probably not for me. Plus, if I simply picked songs that immediately connected with me and discarded the rest, I would have missed out on a lot of great music that has grown on me over time. Who here hasn’t had the experience of buying an album that is initially underwhelming, and then finally “getting” it after repeated listens?
Of course, I realize I’m in the minority here. I’d be willing to bet that most of my students (who are in their late teens and early twenties) have never listened to an album all the way through. And I’m also willing to admit that they’re exercising a creativity of sorts by “editing” albums and putting together their own playlists. Maybe I’m just too lazy, as I’d rather leave that creative control to musicians.
This is exactly the way I see this issue.
I am an ‘album guy’ too but I think ITunes has changed the way we all listen to music, whether it’s an individual artist or a genre. Sometimes you want to hear a whole album, sometimes you want a playlist, sometimes a genre, sometimes an artist’s whole catalog on random sample. It’s all good, there is no “right” way to listen to music I don’t think!
The digital music experience has basically led back to the way most people *used* to listen to music. Up until the mid-60s (some artists’ work excepted), albums were essentially collections of artists’ singles from that year or so, with some b-sides and filler tracks thrown in to round out the package. Singles were one of the primary ways — if not THE primary way — that people purchased and listened to music in general. They were cheap, and you could build a “playlist” of various tracks if you had a record player with an auto-changer that would drop the next record in the stack down on the turntable. It can be argued that one of the reasons for the sharp decline in record industry profits in the late 90s-early 00s was that the industry phased out the CD single. People were being coerced into purchasing a $15.99 (at the time) full album when they really only wanted the few hit tracks for $3-5, so people stopped buying albums and turned to Napster for the few songs they wanted.
But yeah, you could be a fan of a band based only on their singles. Historically, plenty of bands’ entire careers rode on their singles’ popularity.
@Aleck Bennett: That’s a really interesting point.
@Brian: Agreed that there’s no right right way to listen to music (and hope my comment didn’t come across as suggesting otherwise).
People in the 90’s were also duped in to paying $$$ for singles that came in 4 different flavors, with like 1 different b-side, and 1 live cut on each one, or some slightly different remix by Photek or something. It was getting kinda crazy there for a while. There was good stuff, don’t get me wrong, but the labels were charging an arm and a leg for it, especially the imports.
For the most part, though, those multiple singles (with “exclusive remixes” and such) things were largely UK releases, where the single remained a huge deal long after the US veered more toward album-oriented sales. The US labels weren’t terribly interested in pursuing that revenue, preferring big numbers on individual releases rather than the dollar-here-dollar-there profits that came from singles’ sales. The jacked-up prices came largely through distributor middlemen and import duties and the like. (Former Tower Records buyer here.)
In fact, I heard that the term “album” originally hails from the early 20th century before LPs; specifically the practice of packaging 4 or 5 shellac 78 rpm records – each with their own paper sleeve – into a leatherbound book-type presentation very similar to a photo album; hence the music industry’s adaptation of the term. So to start with, they literally WERE a collection of singles.
(Go into a bric-a-brac shop and you can still find such things. I once saw an “Enclopedia of Jazz” -type omnibus that took up about as much shelf space as the Britannica but all vinyl. Imagine that but for metal!)
Album-oriented rock really only arrives with the Beatles and others taking advantage of the LP’s playing time to experiment with longer and segued pieces, not to mention contractual artistic control. That’s the tradition that acid rock, and its heavy metal descendant, are borne from.
Which is not to say there aren’t plenty of metal bands out there who can’t really sustain my interest over 45 minutes, even when they’re bands I like. I think the main problem is when the metal album became the default format for release rather than the “special occasion”-type thing it should be. I’ll criticize the punk rock scene for many things, but one thing I think they do better than us is the tradition of bands releasing 7″s and EPs, usually on different labels, that are interspersed with albums rather than starting with an album and just churning them out – with the same label and producer usually – year after year. Every time you have to approach your music with a different format, personnel or business model, you give it a little less predictability in terms of what you accomplish artistically.
Not all albums are a waste of aluminium, though. My incomplete list of definative all-killer-no-filler:
Mayhem – Live in Leipzig
Burzum – Hvis Lyset Tar Oss
Bathory – Blood, Fire, Death
Entombed – Clandestine
Carcass – Symphonies of Sickness
Slayer – pretty much anything ‘86 to ‘94
Rollins Band – The End of Silence (a double LP, no less!)
Peter Gabriel – Passion (go ahead and laugh – and then listen to it.)
That’s absolutely correct, and a point I completely forgot. Albums were initially like photo albums. The more accurate name for what we today think of as “albums” was LP, for Long Playing record. The distinction between the two became blurred more and more as the traditional album was phased out.
May I add to your “All-killer-NO-filler” list as follows:
– Faith No More: The Real Thing
– Cathedral: The Ethereal Mirror
– Paradise Lost: Icon, Draconian Times, One Second, Host, Symbol of Life
– Tiamat: Wildhoney
– My Dying Bride: 34.8% complete (ah, who’s going to flame me on that one?)
– Katatonia: Discouraged Ones
– Samael: Passage, Eternal
– Sepultura: Chaos A.D
– Carcass: Heartwork
– Death: Human, Individual Thought Patterns
– Devin Townsend: Ocean Machine – Biomech, Infinity, City, Physicist, Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing
– Ihsahn: After, Eremita
haha castlevania reference!
I’m predominantly a full album guy. I usually find if an album only has one or two good songs on it it’s not really worth listening to. If I have a craving for a certain song I’ll hop on youtube. However, I do occasionally rework certain albums that are flawed but still have a higher good ratio to crap. I personally like Morbid Angel’s “Heretic”, but I can’t stand the way its formatted originally. Too many jokey, crappy interludes that ruin the flow. This is how I usually listen to it.
1. Memories of the Past
2. Cleansed in Pestilence (Blade of Elohim)
3. Enshrined by Grace
4. Beneath the Hollow
5. Curse the Flesh
6. Praise the Strength
7. Stricken Arise
8. Place of Many Deaths
9. Abyssous
10. Within Thy Enemy
11. God of Our Own Divinity
12. Victorious March of Reign the Conqueror
Rest is deleted.
I’m mostly an album listener. Even my playlists in iTunes are made up of albums, and I use them more for organization than making a mix of songs. Sometimes, though, I cherry pick a song (or a few) from a band/artist and listen to that. It doesn’t seem to matter to what extent I like the band/artist (could be a “favorite” band or a band I just “like”).
As for whether you can be considered a fan despite only liking a smattering of songs by a particular artist or band, I think you can be. Fandom has degrees — you can be a casual fan, a plain-old fan, a big fan, a hardcore fan, etc. How you choose to classify yourself depends on how often you listen and how much of an artist/band’s oeuvre you like.
Have you encountered a band that you don’t necessarily like, a band that can’t seem to write a good album, and yet teases you with a few cherries on each album?
That’s … most bands?
Megadeth, for instance, is the obvious metal example that springs to mind.
I find that 3 Inches of Blood does a little better, but the same effect; a couple good tracks on each album, and the rest is mediocre.
Etc., etc., etc.
(Me, I use that wonderful rating metadata in iTunes, and build my portable phone playlist automatically with 4-5 star rated songs, plus any new stuff I want to give an ear to.)
On an entirely different take, Krallice’s 3 albums (and the “Orphan…” LP) on random equals one amazingly long marathon listening experience that’s only amazing. I do this regularly. Also, Thou works well for that. Based on your cherry-picking mentality though, based on Yellow & Green, I’d say Baroness now falls in to that category.
I’m mostly an album listener, so if a band has only a couple of songs I like, I tend not to listen to them. But there are days that I need to hear a single song on an album I otherwise love, and I’ll skip right to it.
Here’s what I do. After I listen to an album several times, and I’m ready to take it out of regular rotation, I listen to it again, rating each song in iTunes from 1 to 5. I have a series of “smart playlists” that then regularly rotate all of these songs onto the iPod, based on rating (way more 5’s than 4’s, a few 3’s, and just a handful of 2’s) and last-played date. Then, shuffle, or go to a song and turn on Genius. (Genius is woefully inadequate with the more obscure stuff, though). If I want to listen to an album that’s already been rated, I put it on a playlist for that purpose.
Still, at least 80% of the time I’m listening to albums. That’s why the most recently played song on those playlists is from June of last year.
This has the added benefit of making me realize when I’ve outgrown something. When something comes up on shuffle and I skip it, and then skip it again, and skip it again, I know it’s time to get rid of that album. You could call it “going the way of Staind,” whom I used to like many eons ago (until the first time I heard 14 Shades of Grey).
“Going the way of Staind”! That is awesome. Even though I do periodically break out some Staind, they are a great example of a band that I used to play intentionally and now almost never think to listen to. Well done, sir.
I am an album listener because I believe that on an album, that bad songs are just as IMPORTANT as the good ones in creating the overall picture that the artist intended. The valleys only make the peaks seem higher, ect.
I usually agree with that.
+1 for “The valleys only make the peaks seem higher”
And I agree with that statement especially when I think of artists of the caliber of Devin Townsend and Ihsahn: everything needs to be put in the perspective of the “broad scheme of things”, as part of an intricate and self-sustaining system.