THE MANIFEST
In the world cup of rock n roll, England and America are the typical leaders. In distance second we have Australia, Sweden, Canada, and Ireland. The English speaking countries seem to have the advantage, which makes sense since rock originates from the English speaking world and culturally moves outward. I don’t know why Sweden excels so well, probably has something to do with the socialist utopia they live in.
I’ve often caught myself saying that EPs are better than LPs. While probably being a bit of an exaggeration, I do often find that a quick sampling of songs serve some bands better then the long form of an album. With albums the band often runs out of A-list material and has to resort to filler and gimmicks. The EP is a nice middle ground between the album and the single; giving you more then just a brief taste, but not so much that you’re full.
There are some bands who I feel have released their best material on EPs, which unfortunately often cripples them in the public’s eye because we focus so much on the album and often pass over the EPs.
I always admired bands that end clean, bands that don’t stretch their stay in the limelight. When they run out of ideas they get out of the way for fresh minds with new sounds. F.T. Marinetti said, in his manifesto of futurism:
Summer is over, technically. It gave us some new EPs and LPs from a couple of our favorite bands. Here’s 3 that earned a steady repeat on our black mirrors:
We’ve already spoken at length about the future of formats and the decline of the album, today we’d like to discuss the more recent record industry invention of the special edition or deluxe version of the album. This is when an album has two releases; one being the standard album, the other being the same album with 2 to 6 tracks added on to the end. The extra tracks are often the tracks from the album recording session that weren’t good enough or didn’t fit in with the rest of the album. Sometime the bands fills the deluxe editions with cover songs, live tracks, acoustic versions, or demo recordings. In cinema the same trend is happening with special editions and bonus features in DVDs, in literature the same thing is happening with new editions including frivolous extras, such as letters, poems by the author, essays, forwards, prefaces, etc.