The Slow Demise of the Album

Gone are the days when people would purchase an album with the intent to listen to the whole thing through. Nowadays people just buy their favorite singles on iTunes. Sadly though that may be the thing that is slowly killing my favorite type of album, the concept album.

Recently my wife told me about how the people on her social network for moms type website were attacking the new single by The Decemberists, which has lyrics describing a father systematically killing his children one by one. The thing is, that song is right in the middle of the cd, and it is introducing us to the villain character of an overarching storyline. The character is describing his previous deeds to the woman he has just abducted. Suffice it to say that he meets an unpleasant end in a later song, but of course those denouncing the lyrics as a glorification of violence never read that part. Now, I'm not entirely sure who's at blame here. Maybe it was band themselves idea to have that song be the single, or maybe it was the record companies. Either way it was an unwise choice, but if we didn't live in a time when the single is the only important part of a record release then we would have never encountered this issue.

It's releases like this new Decemberists cd that excite me the most. I love to pick apart the story of an album and piece it all together. Musical movements are introduced in earlier songs, and then reappear in later ones to establish thematic tones and elements. Characters have whole songs sometimes just to flesh out a back story for them, whereas if it were just one song then we would never get a back story. We would just be told the characters names and that they were in love and something happened. The End.

Our culture has devolved into a society of people with a 3 minute or so attention span. When The Mars Volta put out a cd that had a half an hour long song on it, the studio decided to try to chop it up into lots of different songs and even considered releasing one of those as a single. It didn't matter that the song as a whole was the most powerful and intense song the band had ever done, and probably ever will do.

Record companies have no idea what to do with bands that tell stories nowadays, and that's sad. I will always be a million times more interested in a cd that keeps pulling me back to discover new parts of a fascinating storyline then a poppy single that keeps my interest for exactly 3 minutes. Do society a favor and support bands that put thought into plotting out the structure of a full album by purchasing and listening to that album from start to finish.