Rockissue

The Comings and Goings of the 40-Minute Album/ Reconsidering an (Arguably) Awkwardly-Long Album of the Compact Disc Era: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: No More Shall We Part

Since the Compact Disc (C. D.) supplanted cassettes and vinyl around 1990, albums have generally been too long; a development that the cassette had already fostered. The overwhelming predominance of the C. D. made vinyl a niche market for about a decade and a half. Albums still came out in the vinyl Long Play (L. P.) format, most commonly from Rock artists, especially Indie—and even then in limited numbers—but for the most part artists began to conceive of their albums as a seamless listening experience instead of being split into two or more parts. For example, Robert Wyatt, when discussing the construction of his 1997 album Shleep specifically referred to the challenges presented by conceptualizing an album as a singular, and relatively long, piece of music (Shleep, by the way, being one of many albums that we may assume came out on vinyl at the time of their initial release but did not; many such Nineties and Aughts titles have recently been reissued on vinyl).

Many stand-out recent albums, in contrast, fit both the C. D. and L. P. formats well, suggesting that the vinyl resurgence, however hyped-up and downright-silly it has been at times, at least has played some role in making artists realize they are likely better off releasing albums no more than 50 minutes in length, ideally closer to 40. A result being that those artists who have always appreciated the vinyl format, and in turn give considerable thought to the complications of sequencing music across the vinyl side's limited temporal span, challenge themselves by making more multi-disk albums. Then again, artists realizing they have on their hands an album that works best being 50-60 minutes long can accept an impractical, but audiophile, solution: refuse to stretch the length of L. P. sides, making a short double or triple L. P. or a three-sided (or five-sided) L. P., perhaps even combining an L. P. with an E. P. (that is, one of the two discs is played at 45 rotations per minute (R. P. M.), while the other is at the regular 33-and-one-third rotations).

In recent years, double/ triple L. P. epics have become common in Indie/ Rock popular music and show up in other genres as well. Some examples of these, with notes on how they are formatted:

2009:
The Flaming Lips - Embryonic. Developed and sequenced as both a double C. D. and L. P., with the sequence the same in both formats, but more widely made available as a single C. D., since the two halves fit on a single disc.

Oneida - Rated O. Triple C. D. and vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

2010:
Beach House - Teen Dream. Single C. D., double vinyl, sequence the same in both formats, sides B and C very short—a good example of not ruining the sound quality of the L. P. with narrow grooves. Its 2012 follow-up, Bloom, has the same set-up.

Excepter - Presidence. Double C. D., no vinyl edition. If there had been a quadruple L.P., two of the tracks, ‘Presidence’ and ‘Og’, would have been split into two sides, as both are about a half-hour in length; in general, the album is a mess by their standards; the tracks collectively titled ‘Teleportation’, also totaling around a half hour, would have made for an excellent single album; another L. P. could have consisted of ‘The Open Well‘ on one side with ’Leng' and ‘The Anti-Noah’ on another.

Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me. Triple C. D. and vinyl, same set-up as Rated O: the C. D.s not long enough to cause sequencing problems for the vinyl sides.

Katy Perry - Teenage Dream. Single C. D., double vinyl, sequence the same in both formats; short sides all around.

2011:
Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow. Single C. D., double vinyl.; sequence the same in both formats; side A's too long, B's too short.

Lou Reed/ Metallica - Lulu. Double C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Wilco - The Whole Love. Single C. D., double vinyl ; different sequence of tracks, plus the vinyl sports an extra track.

2012:
Chromatics - Kill for Love. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Swans - The Seer. Double C. D., triple vinyl; different sequence of tracks on each.

Scott Walker - Bish Bosch. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Psychedelic Pill. Double C. D., five-sided "sesquialbum" vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

2013:
The Flaming Lips - The Terror. Single C. D., double vinyl, but the nine tracks of the album comprise only three sides of the vinyl, the fourth being a bonus track.

The Invisible Hands' eponymous double album. Single (abridged) C. D., double vinyl; the same songs by Alan Bishop, formerly of Sun City Girls, recorded twice with a Cairo-based band, once in English, once in Arabic. The single C. D. version sadly only contains the English-language versions (that is, half the album).

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual. Double C. D., triple vinyl; sequence the same in both formats; the L.P. sides are awfully short.

2014:
Circulatory System - Mosaics within Mosaics. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Excepter - Familiar. Single C. D., three-sided L. P., the third side featuring a single track at 45 R. P. M., the fourth side featuring an etching.

Ty Segall - Manipulator. Single C. D., double vinyl, sequence the same in both formats.

Swans - To Be Kind. Double C. D., triple vinyl; sequence the same in both formats, but the long track, ‘Bring the Sun/ Toussaint L'Ouverture’, is split in two on the vinyl.

2016:
Car Seat Headrest - Teens of Denial. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats but the vinyl sides again are quite short.

Solange - A Seat at the Table. Single C. D., double vinyl.; sequence the same in both formats.

Swans - The Glowing Man. Another double C. D./ triple L. P. from the man who knows no editor, this time with two long tracks having to be split in two on the vinyl.

2017:
Motorpsycho - The Tower. Double C.D. and vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

2018:
Mythic Sunship - Another Shape of Psychedelic Music. Single C.D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

2019:
Bill Callahan - Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats, all four sides being on the short side.

Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Swans - Leaving Meaning. Double C. D. and vinyl, with the latter missing a track and including abridged versions of six of the other 11 tracks.

75 Dollar Bill - I Was Real. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Colorado. Single C.D., three-sided L. P., the fourth side bearing an etching; sequence the same in both formats.

2020:
Hen Ogledd - Free Humans. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Hey Colossus - Dances/ Curses. Double C. D. and vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

Róisín Murphy - Róisín Machine. Single C. D., double vinyl; sequence the same in both formats.

These cases of long albums being stuffed into the confines of 20-minute vinyl sides foster at least two opinionated takes on the recent history of the music trade, both featuring the proverbial vinyl enthusiast partaking in alternate-historicizing. This character, worthy of simultaneous respect, pity, and scorn (I sometimes call him the Vinyl Fetishist), would say that the willingness—eagerness!—of their ilk to embrace three-sided "vinyls," etchings, and other curio-like variations on the gramophone standard shows that the longer albums of the C. D. era could have been coming out on vinyl all along. They too would say that the artist should not worry about how long his album is: figure that out in the creative process, then craft the vinyl around whatever length it turns out to be.

On that note, there are plenty of double L. P.s released during the C. D. era not commonly referred to as doubles; as with the examples above, some of them have short sides or bonus tracks to make the sides not too short. Some examples:

Sonic Youth - Dirty [one bonus track]
Frank Black - Teenager of the Year
Soundgarden - Superunknown [one bonus track]
The Verve - A Northern Soul
Radiohead - O. K. Computer
Destiny's Child - The Writing's on the Wall
D'Angelo - Voodoo
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - No More Shall We Part [two bonus tracks comprise side D]
Bob Dylan - "Love and Theft"
Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It in People

Taking a broader historical perspective now, in addition to Excepter's Familiar noted above, here are some more 3-sided L. P.s, much rarer (this category doesn't include L. P.s with a bonus seven-inch, such as Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, or double L. P.s with such, like Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life):

Johnny Winter - Second Winter
Keith Jarrett - Eye of the Heart
Utopia's 1982 eponymous album
Joe Jackson - Big World
Julian Cope - Jehovahkill
Death in June - Something Is Coming
Thurston Moore - Psychic Hearts
Pavement - Wowee Zowee
Built to Spill - Perfect from Now On
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Nocturama
Lightning Bolt - Hypermagic Mountain
Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights
Motorpsycho - Heavy Metal Fruit
Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I (the second of two albums in this series, in contrast, is a three-sided E. P., entirely 45 R. P. M.)

Besides Young's Psychedelic Pill, the Mars Volta also have a five-sided album, Frances the Mute. So that the second vinyl-enthusiast alternate history perhaps is not so alternate after all: artists did release albums without excessive concern for their exact lengths, and how those timings matched up with the ideal length of a vinyl record, and yet often the albums did still come out on vinyl.

With innumerable download-only (or, god forbid! streaming-only) albums making the rounds of our internet tubes, one can only begin to imagine how many five-sided, three-sided, double, triple, quadruple, or whatever albums there would be if limited resources like time and vinyl-manufacturing plants suddenly became plentiful and made our vinyl enthusiast's dreams come true. Just look at the case of Nanocyborg Uberholocaust, if you dare (or have the time). If we designate an album era as having begun sometime in the Sixties, we have spent more time listening to albums that tend to be too long than we did listening to albums closer to the accidental L. P. ideal of 40 minutes, an ideal that we did not quite appreciate of course until we had such a large amount of the non-ideal to compare it to. We could say that popular music before 1990 had passed through an era of scarcity, engendering an appreciation for brevity, and that since 1990 it has lived through an era of plenty, leading to a tendency toward gigantism. Music coming to us as computer files, especially the transitory files provided by streaming, suggests little to no possibility of this era coming to an end. For example, one of the artists noted above, Excepter, released a five-hour download, 40,000 Leagues Under the SEA (alternately known as STREAM 40) in 2007. Unsurprisingly, this recording documents a live performance, and indeed in concert recordings we encounter numerous examples of excess production beyond all previous expectations, most famously in the exhaustive documentation of the Grateful Dead's concerts, especially their 1972 European tour. As the C. D. was replaced by the download, and in turn all disparate albums and singles have been replaced by endless streaming, we find ourselves in a perpetual state of overload. All this is not to say we are not still presented with single L. P.s that are too long. The digital online age offers us more of everything: recorded music as well as the written word and television/ cinema. And in turn, we are all presented with options for trying to tame this sensory overload: Digital Minimalism and all that, which contribute further to the overload.

The first vinyl-enthusiast alternate history does not work out quite as well. If artists in the C. D. era had continued to sequence their albums for the vinyl format, we cannot ignore the simple fact that they could have easily done so, given that the maximum C. D. length of, first, 74 minutes, then almost 80 minutes, is close to our ideal length of a double L. P. However, artists were reluctant to stuff the C. D. up to its max because, reasonably, they knew that such long albums were wear the patience of listeners. Fifty-minute, and 60-minute, albums, so the thinking went, were well digestible while also giving the big record labels an excuse for the high prices of the C. D. relative to vinyl, despite the higher costs of production of the latter. Moreover, as much as an artist or group at the peak of their artistry could fill up a C. D. and in the process make a fine double vinyl (for example, a few albums from 1991: Primal Scream - Screamadelica; Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik; Sebadoh III), there are as many artists—probably more—who bequeathed us ridiculous exercises in pompous excess, most notably a couple more from 1991: Guns n' Roses' dual Use Your Illusion releases, both sequenced as single C. D.s/ double L. P.s. If there had been a single Use Your Illusion, that is: a double album instead of a quadruple, we would have had a fine follow-up to Appetite for Destruction, with utter monstrosities like ‘My World’ thrown into the trash.

Indeed, the peak-C. D. era that immediately preceded our current era saw plenty of albums clearly formatted for C. D. only, and which never should have been as long as they are, including not only those that stretched to 74 or 80 minutes; a sort of intermittent stage, artists weighing the possibilities, provided by those new shiny disks, of "letting it all hang out." In other words, if the artist had conceived of the album as a single L. P., the result would have been significantly superior. Ironically, thus, if we focus too much on all the neat variations on the standard slab of vinyl that longer albums offer us, we ignore the clearer reality that, again, many albums since the cassette/ C. D. era have been too—damned—long. A prominent example of this is one of the C. D.-era double albums noted above: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' No More Shall We Part. The follow-up to The Boatman's Call, still arguably the best Cave album-as-a-whole-album, a cohesive listening experience—even as one could easily argue that other albums, say the Birthday Party's Junkyard or the Bad Seeds' Your Funeral... My Trial or Let Love In, are more representative of Cave's body of work or better starting points for new listeners—No More Shall We Part not only suffers in the shadows of the widespread acclaim of and continued appreciation for its predecessor, it also faced more of a mixed critical reception when it was released. Undoubtedly, the ambiguity many listeners feel about it is a result not of the album's overall mediocrity, but its own mixed make-up: several excellent compositions, but also several good, but surprisingly mundane, songs.

The simpler way to put this: remove four of the 12 tracks and you would have an album spoken of with nearly the same reverence as Boatman's, slightly less than 50 minutes; still long, but only because of the substantive length of most of the tracks. Which of the 12 tracks, though, is the hard part. To start, let us make clear that, with a writer of Cave's talent, a track may not be a significant or worthy addition to the Bad Seeds discography even as its lyrics are as brilliant as ever— Cave's "ever" or anyone's "ever"—meaning that a track excluded from an album would ideally find its way to the B side of a single or even serve as a non-L. P. single.

Perhaps we consider first the tracks that should not be cut. They form an overarching story, of a man seeking forgiveness from a lover (‘Love Letter’), getting married (‘And No More Shall We Part’), facing emotional crises both melodramatic, coming close to self-parody, on ‘Oh My Lord’, and quite serious on ‘Sorrowful Wife’, interspersed with a vignette presumably describing a scene in his married life (‘As I Sat Sadly by Her Side’), reaching a state of peace with oneself and the wider world (‘Gates to the Garden’ and ‘Darker with the Day’), only to end up alone, disoriented, and destined to meet an unpleasant death (‘Hallelujah’). Alas, the songs are not presented in this order; most important, ‘Hallelujah’ comes early in the sequence. We may be tempted to rearrange tracks, but in my own experiments I found this a fruitless pursuit; ‘Hallelujah’ is too much a centerpiece to be placed at the conclusion.

Finally... what gets cut? ‘Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow’, ‘God Is in the House’, ‘Sweetheart Come’, and ‘We Came along This Road’. ‘Fifteen Feet’, released as a single to promote the album, presumably found favor with some listeners at some point in time. It is definitely a compelling song, the first of three on the album (followed by ‘Oh My Lord’ and ‘My Sorrowful Wife’) that each culminate in intense crescendoes, the Bad Seeds at full effect. But the melody formed by interlocking piano and guitar parts framing the song is pesteringly similar to the piano melody in ‘As I Sad Sadly by Her Side’, the album's opening track (another single released from the album—who was making these decisions?). And we already had a song about a person dying in a rainstorm—do we need one about children dying in snow drifts? And the narrator on ‘Hallelujah’, like the narrator on ‘Fifteen Feet’, refers to a nurse. Though Cave would, on the recent album Ghosteen, effectively use repeated lyrical motifs across a long album, on this album these repetitions seem sloppy.

The other songs that should have been excluded are not mediocre, not great; in short: distracting, blunting the album's impact. ‘God Is in the House’ has been played frequently in live performances. Its sarcastic humor at least is not limited to easy targets; sanctimonious buffoons of all stripes—perhaps call it the fundamentalist-Unitarian continuum—come to mind. And I can imagine our narrator, confident in his early marital bliss, falling prey to the moral arrogance on display here. Ultimately, though it works as dark comedy, when placed alongside such serious material, it is simply too silly. ‘Fifteen Feet’, not as ambitious in its comedic intent, has the same problem. In contrast, the absurdist turns in ‘Oh My Lord’ contribute to the listener's envelopment in the narrator's frenzied mind.

Meanwhile, ‘Sweetheart Come’ and ‘We Came along This Road’ falter mostly due to their unimaginative arrangements; in particular, the backing vocals by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, crucial to ‘Hallelujah’ and a welcome addition elsewhere on the album, are wasted on these two tracks. The former is a belabored presentation, not the first time in these years that the Bad Seeds beat too much material out of a song (see ‘Loverman’ on Let Love In). The latter is a minor attraction, underdeveloped, appropriate for a B side.

As forgettable as they may be, these three songs, as well as similar tunes on the next Bad Seeds album, Nocturama (‘Still in Love’ and ‘She Passed by My Window’, which, along with ‘Dead Man in My Bed’, could have been excised to make a better, appropriately-sized single L. P.), may have formed a necessary stage in Cave's work. The emotional gravitas of most of the songs on No More Shall We Part and The Boatman's Call makes high demands upon the performer and his audience. Attempts to surpass or match such artistic heights could prove debilitating. Plenty of artists have made that error. Instead, Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre of Orpheus (unlike No More, sequenced perfectly as a double album) moved away from the sound of No More, heavy on piano and strings, replaced by a full band, with all members contributing more regularly, plus gospel-inflected backing singers—and its lyrics brought us fewer seemingly-autobiographical testaments, more literary allusions, more rousing sing-along sentiments, more universalist proclamations of love and desire.

–Justin J. Kaw, June 2022