silence, you won’t be missed…

the nice thing, i suppose, is that vinyl kinda rules the roost now…

…which for those of us who bought it back when everyone else was buying cd’s there’s a bit of comeuppance.

well, and of course there’s this factor:

VS

but never mind that now…

i just wish some of the nuances of the predominant format of the time (cd’s) hadn’t transferred over to the streaming services. case in point – filter’s title of record:

somehow this album came up into conversation on saturday and got stuck in my brainus after that and so when i went to get the shop ready sunday morning that was the soundtrack. when i went to start it apple music listed the album play time as an hour and ten minutes. this seemed longer than i remembered, but with the time sitting at 9:48am that was perfect as it would end just before i opened the joint. so i started it playing and started in on the shop. i sang along to pretty much all of it, with some air guitar and drumming thrown in, but right as i was wrapping up at around 10:38 the shop went silent. i took off my gloves and grabbed my phone to see the last track, “miss blue”, was listed at over twenty-eight minutes…a three minute song, and then 24:30 of SILENCE followed by the “bonus track” of the vocalist screaming for fifteen seconds.

remember that kinda bullshit?

it was like the broken e.p. from nine inch nails:

i bought it on cassette, and thought it was odd that all six tracks were on side a, because when i had accidentally hit the “reverse” button on the blaupunkt in my car earlier in the album i heard a song on the other side. turns out all of side b was blank until you sat through the twenty-five minutes of silence and then you caught the bonus tracks. that was the first time i’d seen such fuckery on a cassette. the vinyl, which was an extremely limited release, just had the two cuts on a bonus seven inch. the original cd followed suit with a bonus three inch cd of the two songs. but when interscope records bought the rights from tvt and put out what would be the most purchased version of the cd you had songs 1-6, then two seconds of silence for each track from number seven to number NINETY-SEVEN, the there was a track ninety-eight and ninety-nine.

isn’t that fun? if you were driving you either had to sit through three MINUTES of silence or tap that track up button ninety times!

(keep in mind apple music started when apple bought the “beats” app which, unlike the headphone portion of things, wasn’t owned just by dr. dre but was co-owned by mr. nine inch nails himself, trent reznor, and as a result the broken e.p. has none of that bullshit and is just eight straight tracks with an overall run time of thirty-two minutes…)

so more albums need to follow the NIN lead and not the filter one. let’s leave that shit back with those ridiculous pants where it belongs…