These Album Review Things

So chances are you have noticed these Album Reviews I’ve been doing. Perhaps some of the maybe 2 of you who read this blog are wondering what the deal is. So I shall quickly explain.

I was looking through my music library recently and realized that I have a lot of music that, for whatever reason, I just hadn’t listened to in a long time. Because of this I decided I would listen through all of the albums on my computer in alphabetical order. I mean really listen to them, loudly to hear everything and without distracting myself from focusing on the music. After making that decision I thought I should rate them. As you can see I have chosen to write reviews. It is a time consuming project but so far I have been enjoying it.

I have a few rules to govern what I should or shouldn’t review of course. First one being I will only review Albums that were released to the public. This is because I have some things with album names on my computer that are not actually albums.

I also decided that compilations are probably not a great idea either. Particularly movie soundtracks and such because they tend not to be a single artist’s work, and as such must be rated on an entirely different scale. Now some will say “what about greatest hits albums? Those are compilations aren’t they?” Well yes I suppose they are. And I also feel there is an inherent flaw in greatest hits albums. I haven’t reached one of those in my library yet however, and have not decided if I will actually review them. So far I am leaning towards listening and not reviewing.

Before I explain the last rule here is a definition of some of the abbreviations coming up:

EP= Extended Play
LP= Long Playing record

An EP contains a few songs (usually around 3-5 songs), and an LP is a full album. The terms are from the days of vinyl records. In the 1980's, promotional vinyl EPs were often sent to clubs and radio stations to give an overview of an artist's music, and live EPs of top-selling artists were sometimes sent to radio stations to promote the artist on tour and extend the life of an album. The popularity of the promotional EP caused labels to start manufacturing them for the general public, often in colored vinyl and with previously unseen photos used as cover art.

As for the difference between an EP and a single, CD singles have blurred the meanings a bit, but originally a single contained 2 songs: one on the "A-side", and one on the "B-side." (During the days of vinyl singles, occasionally an extra song would be included, though not often.) CD technology allowed more minutes of music than previous music formats, so labels took advantage of it and added "bonus tracks" to some CD singles. Technically speaking, a CD single with bonus tracks is actually an EP...but labels found that calling it a "single with bonus tracks" made it more appealing to consumers.

Right so, the third rule spawned after doing that Mogwai EP review. I decided that EPs and singles are sort of in their own realm. Like, usually the reason they exist is because a few tracks were super popular and there was some extra stuff they didn’t get to fit on the LP but still wanted to get out.

This last one does run into a small probably for some of my stuff though. For example there is a rare single, (a-side and b-side) that is a collaboration and neither track exists anywhere else. So should I review that? There seems to be an extent to which I might have to do singles and EPs on a case by case basis...

Anyway, this post ended up much longer then I had envisioned, but now everyone is clear I hope.

P.S. My whole blog is not dedicated to this project, I do still plan to write just normal entries, but they have been few and far between lately anyway so now you still have some stuff to look at during the slow times.