'Retto Ruminations
By: Amy Sciarretto
Last updated February 11th , 2010

Last week's column regarding the loss of mystique in music really resonated with people. I saw it "retweeted" a few times on Twitter and received a few emails about it from people I didn't forward it to, so that was great to see. Word travels fast. And that was almost the point of the column. 

As I type this column getting ready for the Super Bowl, sad that the football season is truly over, I am wondering how the hell just 30 miles south of where I live in North Jersey, just 11 miles from Manhattan, they got clobbered with 6 inches of snow and just 60 miles south of that, they got blasted with 27 inches of snow. We didn't have flake in NYC, so I guess I should listen to Lewis Black, the comedian, when he says don't listen to the group of assholes who make up the Weather Channel! The point? South Jersey a lot; North Jersey, just a little. It reminded me of a discussion I had on Friday with bassist Alan Robert, of Life of Agony. We were guesting on a podcast together and we were talking about how bands play albums in their entirety now, when these albums celebrate their anniversaries. Machine Head performed Burn My Eyes from start to finish in August 2004, for that album's tenth anniversary. Life of Agony played River Runs Red from front to back last November, as that album reaches its twentieth anniversary! Megadeth will be playing all of Rust in Peace, which is also celebrating its two decade history, on its forthcoming March tour with Testament, who will be playing all of 1987's The Legacy. For bands to celebrate a full album and play it from beginning to end, playing deep album cuts that the band may never have played live or have only rarely played live, is a special event. It recalls the time when the album was a special event, when you memorized every song, every riff and every lyric. Sometimes there would be a song lingering at the end of an album that you love, but never heard live, no matter how many times you went and saw the band. Deep cuts aren't the hits; but they are yours and mine.

Alan and the podcast panel also talked about how the album is a dying medium. I don't mean the album as a recorded product; I mean the album, as in anywhere from 9 to fourteen songs, perhaps more or less. Nowadays, the kids are fans of the song, the hit, what they hear on the radio, on a band's MySpace player or their friends' iPods. It's about the song, the moment. It's not about listening to the opening track, which usually isn't the first single. It's about listening to track two and three, one of which is most likely the first single. It's about listening until the last note fades out. Kids don't do that nowadays. They are song collectors; they aren't album connoisseurs and what is tragic about that is a band is so much more than a song. Sure, the hit single is what propels a band to a larger audience and we all know about the one-hit wonder syndrome. That said, and this refers back to last week's column, there is something special about discovering other songs from a band, the rest of their catalogue, digging deep into an album and finding songs that you love that the rest of the world has yet to unearth or perhaps never will. That's what separates a casual music fan from a diehard, passionate music lover. You can absorb the hit and love it, but when you go that next step and find a treasure buried nowhere near the hit in an album's song sequence, it's like your own little piece of heaven.

For me, my favorite song on 36 Crazyfists' A Snow Capped Romance, an album that I didn't like at all when it first landed in 2004  but that has grown on me to become one of my favorites and one that I consider one of the best of the ‘00s, is the tenth track, "Cure Eclipse." It's tacked on at the end, isn't easy to find yet to me, it's better than everything else on a record that's already really fucking good. People who also know and adore that record always say, "You really love that song? I gotta listen to it again." They just haven't caught on yet.

Another favorite song on an all-time favorite album for me is "Wear it So Well" by Far on 1998's Water and Solutions. It's the ninth song on the album and the moody, dark, almost self-hating tone of the song, along with the almost conducted way the music song is what does it for me. I love the song and it's lyrics so much I have a lyrical phrase from the song incorporated into a tattoo that I have. 

So again, the point is that the song is not the album. The song is just part of the album. If you only like the song, the single, what you hear in a passive fashion, you are missing out on so much. An album is a work unto itself, made up the little pieces that are the songs. What the pieces come to form together, as the whole, as the album, is what's special. My advice to music fans is to do your niece or nephew or little sister of cousin a favor and introduce them to the concept of the album, and not a concept album, either. Educate them about value of the album and then ask them to listen to an album from beginning to end. To see it through. They'll surely thank you for it. The best homework assignment they'll ever have is you telling them to devote an hour of their day listening to a series of songs on an album. How hard is that? It might be difficult for the iPod/digital generation, but they can do it. They need to keep the album a viable entity.

Ok, time to go watch these commercials, this The Who half-time show and the Peyton Manning show. ~ Amy Sciarretto

[Tags] Metal

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