Songs of Innocence, Words of Nonsense

U2 did some sort of Q&A session on Facebook last week and things got slightly awkward when - to the surprise of no one - they were called out on their decision to force new album Songs of Innocence into every iTunes library on the planet. Here's how it went:

Q: "Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people's playlists ever again? It's really rude."

Bono:  "Oops. Sorry about that...I had this beautiful idea and we got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. A drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, a dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn't be heard."

As my emboldening suggests, it's the last part of that sentence fragment in which I'm interested today. I'll admit that I did feel a pang of sympathy for U2 when I first heard Bono's apology - after all, I've written songs, and I know better than Bono what it's like to wonder if anyone will ever actually listen to them.

But yesterday, I found myself re-reading that quote, and my sympathy gave way to annoyance. Now I realise that, if Bono really cared about those songs, he chose the worst possible way to release them.

Balls to Bonus Tracks

I appreciate that selling an album nowadays is nigh-on impossible. Streaming sites like Spotify (as well as good old-fashioned piracy) have made purchasing the physical version less essential than ever, and so it's easy to see why artists and record labels might think that bonus tracks are a good idea. They're an incentive, a little extra something for the people who actually bothered to visit a record shop and fork over some cash - who could object to that?

Well, me, as you probably guessed from this blog's title. Bonus tracks get on my nerves, and frankly, I wish bands would cut that shit out. I don't want any extra tracks on my CDs, and here are several reasons why:

They ruin the finality of the closing track
Imagine your favourite closing track. Better yet, use one of mine: Still Life from Suede's Dog Man Star.

Now, there are a lot of closing tracks that would work equally well in any other slot, but Still Life is absolutely not one of them - that spectacular final chorus, those majestic strings, and the flickering guitar figure at the very end should only EVER be followed by awed, open-mouthed silence (see also: São Paulo by the Guillemots).

A Crack in Everything: Ocean Rain

Welcome to A Crack in Everything, the thing I sometimes do where I point out everything that's bad about the albums I love. It's a positive process.

Telling everyone that your new record is "the greatest album ever made" is risky business. Sure, it gets our attention, but you're setting yourself up for quite the tumble - after all, there aren't many albums that could live up to that kind of hype.

It's to Echo & The Bunnymen's credit, then, that Ocean Rain was extremely well-received; given the hyperbolic marketing campaign, even a quite-good album would have been laughed out of town. But Ocean Rain was good enough that people could kind of see where McCulloch and Co were coming from. Even if it wasn't really The Greatest Album Ever Made, it was close enough that the rock world were prepared to let it slide. After all, it would be churlish to complain about the album that gave the world My Kingdom and Seven Seas and The Killing Moon.

5 from My Wishlist

So the 2014 Welsh Music Prize shortlist was announced yesterday, and while (as predicted) American Interior and Futurology did indeed make the cut, so did ten other albums with which I am not familiar.

Here's the thing, though: I'd dearly love to repeat my WMP odyssey of 2013, but purchasing the nominated albums that I don't already own would cost me the best part of £100. I simply don't have that money lying around at the moment, and even if I did, there are several other CDs that are significantly further up my wishlist than anything on the shortlist.

So, no - barring the possibility of an unexpected windfall, I won't be reviewing each WMP-shortlisted album in turn like I did last year. Sorry, but if I spent all my money on Euros Childs and The Gentle Good, I'd have none left for...

My Favourite Faded Fantasy by Damien Rice

Mere weeks ago, the idea of a third Damien Rice album seemed like a pipe dream. We hadn't seen hide or hair of Mr Rice since 2006 (the year when the criminally underappreciated 9 first saw the light of day), and it was looking increasingly like we'd never hear from him again...until news of My Favourite Faded Fantasy broke and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

I've kept away from the album's single (I Don't Want to Change You, already available to hear online), simply because I want the album to be a surprise when I finally do hear it. I'm hoping for something that's just as good and as emotionally wallopy as 9 was.

Papernut & The Primitives

The album on the left is There's No Underground by Papernut Cambridge. The one on the right is Spin-O-Rama by The Primitives. Both albums are released today, and so I thought I'd review them side-by-side, to find out what else they have in common. Words in red refer to the Papernut album, while the blue words are all about The Primitives.

With There's No Underground, Ian Button's outfit have created a pleasantly odd little world in which people manage to get by without any help from the government or, uh, the tube. The album is populated by such oddball characters as 'The King of the Prams and the Dustbins' and the mysterious 'umbrella man'. This is the sort of thing you'd find on a Mansun album, but the songs actually sound more like a cross between The Kinks and Robyn Hitchcock.

Spin-O-Rama, as far as I can tell, aims to evoke the dizzy euphoria that you get on those funfair rides that spin you around until you vomit.