Another Reason to Love Vinyl: The Album Side

Not that we needed another reason, but...

CDs, with 60+ minutes of undifferentiated songs, are too long. I mean that in two ways. First, that's a lot of space to fill with good tunes, so most CDs have filler. Next, it's too long, for me at least, to really take it all in. That means that when I have a CD I tend to listen song by song, not to whole albums.

Maybe it's because I grew up with them, but to me LP albums are about the right length.But LPs have another advantage: they have sides, and that's a great thing. 20+ minutes or so of music. It's a disadvantage in classical, where long movements often have to be broken up in the middle. But for jazz and popular music, it's just right. It's another way of dividing up the music. An album might not be great, but it might nevertheless have a great side.

My latest example -- file this under "etc." and not jazz -- is from Sonic Youth's latest LP, The Eternal (Matador, Ole 829-1). Side 4 is a great rock music side. True, it's a bit derivative, knocking off Velvet Underground, REM, maybe Radiohead. But it's the first rock album -- or rather, album side -- that I've become obsessed by in at least 20 years. (You know the feeling: When you're awake, you want to be listening. When it finishes, you want to start it over again.)

It's just three songs, the second of which (the REM clone, called "Walking Blue") is fabulous.

One complaint: The packaging of this LP, though pretty, is inept. It's very difficult to get the records out of their stiff cardboard sleeves, and impossible to do it without some superficial scraping of the record's surface. So now I store these records outside their cardboard sleeves, in paper-and-rice-paper after-market inner sleeves. But there's already some damage (though it's not audible) from the first couple of times I removed the black disks from their original holders.