David Emery Online

Collections of tracks

16 September 2008

Do you listen to albums any more?

For me, the answer is (almost, and I’ll come to that later) no.

In fact, are albums really all that relevant any more?

Now don’t get me wrong, I am very much not trying to push for the single track mentality that we were all supposed to gravitate to thanks to digital music. No, I think getting an artists’ output in roughly 10-15 track chucks works and makes sense; you can’t get a true sense for what an artist is trying to achieve with much less then that.

Singles can so easily be just a one-off, flash in the pan moment of brilliance or conversely an oddity that doesn’t represent the full body of work justly. EPs on the hand can give you much more of the full picture, but still leave you wanting so much more (for example, the 5 track sampler for ‘Twenty One’ by Mystery Jets was by no means representative of the best bits of the full album).

Albums as a collection of tracks, then, is still relevant. However, does the concept of an album make sense?

It’s all about the ubiquitous ‘shuffle’ of course. When iPods and the iTunes Store first came along I remember much talk about the ‘death of the album’ as people could now mix their music collections together into shuffled-up playlists and cherry-pick the tracks they like instead of buying the whole thing, filler and all. 5 years on and this only seems to be half right – people shuffle and concoct playlists, but the death of the album just hasn’t happened. Single tracks sell like singles have always sold – give or take – and album sales (for album artists) have remained steady.

However, digital consumption of music I think is definitely making a difference. Looking around on Last.fm and looking at people’s listening habits you can see a huge amount of ‘shuffle’ – each track being a different artist and a different album. And I think this is not only because of how people are listening but also because of the albums are being released at the moment.

When was the last time you listened to an album that was obviously designed as an album, rather then a series of tracks? Certainly I can’t remember one where sequence really matters being released recently – while that’s not to say they’re not out there (as I’m sure they are) it just doesn’t seem to be that relevant these days.

As a point of reference, right now I’m mostly listening to a shuffled playlist of the new Metallica (ok, not great), Fujiya & Miyagi (promising) and the new TV On The Radio. A pretty diverse bunch, but it works – none of these albums need you to listen to them in one go, none suffer for being part of a playlist.

However – and as referenced at the start – the TV On The Radio album (‘Dear Science,’ comma and all) is something different, something special. It’s only the second album this year that I’ve been motivated to break out of the clutter of a playlist (the other being Portishead) and listen on its own. It’s a superb piece of work, and holds together as a whole extremely well.

I still listen to it on shuffle, though.

As a parting gift, here’s the track ‘DLZ’ from the album – possibly a career highlight:

DLZ.mp3 (5.3MB MP3)