press play

[quotidians]

I firmly believe that playing albums all the way is the best way to listen to music, so I think it's a shame that people are moving away from that in favour of playlists (as much as I love curating my own). There's a lot to be said about artistic intention and what's missed when you only engage with a twelfth of the content at a time, but from a more personal perspective I articulate what's great about artists fully only when I have to sit with their voice for a while.

If you asked me for a favourite song I'd be hard-pressed to give you a solid answer. There's just too many fantastic tracks out there, and their lifespan, or the time they feel "fresh" to me is limited to the point where I've got to archive all my favourite songs every year. I've also never had a paradigm shift moment with any individual track, while many albums have completely shifted my sonic preferences. I remember listening to Pornography (the Cure album) for the first time when I was 14; by then I was already familiar with rock, but when One Hundred Years ripped through my headphones I realized I'd never heard anything like it. With each successive song the atmosphere and tone made me fall in love with the Cure and with post-punk in general. Obsessively listening to Songs of Leonard Cohen in the late winter to early spring of 2024 was what got me into folk. I think giving an album a full listen is the easiest way to figure out whether you enjoy a specific sound. It's also the easiest way to be reminded how much you enjoy tracks you may've forgotten or overlooked. You put on a record for a specific song and then the next one comes on and you're thinking "wow I forgot just how much I love this one lemme stay for one more" on and on for the entire thing. I love albums so much as a format. Just wish cars still had built-in CD players.

Comments

[michaelboy]

In my day (ancient history), I remember the progression of songs in each album as a complete story. Still to this day, when I hear one of the songs online/radio, I'm expecting the next song and find myself usually disappointed when it never happens.

transitions

[comix64]

i think there're some albums that're free to be shuffled or playlisted, usually compilation ones (e.g. the Jungle Fatigue series or the NEOTOKYO° soundtrack), but even when an album doesnt specifically have a flow, if all its tracks are by one artist and have at least a mildly similar feel, its still better to listen in order as an album. most of my favorite albums have more of a explicitly album-oriented feel, usually from album transitions or a sort of perceived intensity wave. for example, my favorite drill & bass album is Hakita's "Tennis, Everyone?", which has album transitions for every track. i never really like putting it on shuffle. it is absolutely meant to be played as an album. the bandcamp description states they all transition in order, transition in an album loop (the last track ends with the same sound the first track starts with), and that they all loop as individual tracks, but i havent found the last to be true, so i usually set up my player to loop the album. listening to its looping end-start really gives a sense of accomplishment after half an hour of pressurized sound. another album i like is Jaime Sin Tierra's "El avión se estrelló y yo sigo volando", which is a much quieter album and still has good transitions, e.x. where Sangre ends with the sound of water and Agua starts with the same uninterruped sound effect. a lot of the album has sounds that go uninterruped between track changes, so the whole album feels like one big performance, one after the other. it's listenable on shuffle or incorperated into an entire shuffled library, but it still makes for quite the auditory spectacle when listened to album-wise. a lot of my favorite albums have this quality. even some which only carry it sparingly, e.x. Machine Girl's "WLFGRL", which doesn't have transitions in the proper sense, does tend to try to keep the intensity of the outgoing sound matched between gaps (that is, all the album's quieter music is in one area of the listing). i wont say transitions are the make-or-break necessity for me to like an album, but all the albums which i consider favorites have at least something resembling a transition. basically, albums are good to me because they let the sound go between any specific track. like some kind of Extended Play, am i right?

but, also, some experimental sound like Piranesi or Bull of Heaven transcends albums, and instead opts for one big track. would i prefer them to be split up into arbitrarily-lengthed tracks? no! but i feel like the extreme singular length of that type of experimental ambience is a defining characteristic. there's a specific difference between one long track and an album, and that is that each track can feel like its own performance, but albums stitch them together.

also, i agree with the following sentiments:
that albums can cause you to remember forgotten tracks
that favorite tracks can fluctuate and are hard to pinpoint
that cars should have CD players!! (among other things... i honestly dont really like CDs as a medium compared to, say, plugging in an iPod, because you can't change CDs. it makes burning one feel a lot more professional and sleek, and makes the playing of one feel a lot more like a proper performance w/r/t its physicality, but if i want to put on music in a car, i would rather be able to pick and choose my playlist and queue on the fly. however, this does not deny the feeling of putting in a white disc with "PESHAY STUDIO SET" scribbled on it and letting the laser spin up before hearing the start of something beautiful unfold.)

Re: transitions

[quotidians]

HARD AGREE. I completely forgot to touch on transitions, but it's probably my favourite feature of the format. Been listening to ambient and trip hop more often where its featured quite prominently. I especially like the transitions in Boards of Canada albums especially due to how atmospheric they are. It's new elements being introduced to a pre-established environment and gradually replacing what was there, which in turn makes me feel like I'm an infant having a new stimulus revealed in a test on object permanence or probabilistic reasoning, something like that. Years ago I remember being completely enamoured by prog rock when they put in stuff like that. I also really loved the transition between "The Funeral Party" and "Doubt" on Faith by the Cure, two very sonically different tracks that are connected by this slow, mournful fade-in, fade-out. Somewhat in the same vein, I occasionally put on William Basinski's Disintegration Loops if I'm having trouble falling asleep, which is just tape loop recordings being played until they deteriorate (like a more repetitive Everywhere at the End of Time.) I agree that there are a lot of albums (particularly compilations) that can be listened to out of order that will still grant you a pretty cohesive experience, but I think there's something about the carefully-curated order that makes some releases more enjoyable from front to back. I often listen to Chet Baker Sings on shuffle, but "Look for the Silver Lining" is way more enjoyable as a closer.

I also agree that the aux cord is far more convenient compared to using a CD in the car, since I typically listen to playlists on the road anyway. I just wish they'd at least give us the option, buuuut I guess I'm not missing a lot + it's kind of a fringe issue when most of the populace have fully embraced streaming or digital libraries anyway. I think my preference for cars with built-in CD players is tied to some weird gratification gained from the physical act of retrieving a disk in a sleeve from the glovebox and popping it on the spindle motor.