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March 28, 2024, 10:20:04 PM

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Optimum Album Length

Started by The Mollusk, October 19, 2021, 02:27:47 PM

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The Crumb

Bloody love a 70 minute messy indie sprawl when it works. The first Tindersticks album, Age of Adz and The Lonesome Crowded West are partly made by their lack of concision.

JaDanketies

Quote from: The Crumb on October 20, 2021, 11:10:13 AMAge of Adz

Illinois is 73 minutes long! Certainly doesn't feel that long when you listen to it, and it's largely viewed as Sufjan's magnum opus and was The Album of the Year 2005 according to a bunch of magazines.

The Crumb

That too, I just slightly prefer Adz personally.

I guess Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation should be up there as a prime example, but something about it just doesn't quite engage me for that long.

The Mollusk

Quote from: purlieu on October 19, 2021, 08:35:41 PM
I think for anything on the more ambient end of things, longer can often be better. Similar with dance music, especially artists who do longer tracks.

If you're doing a pop-rock album within a particular style or aesthetic, though, it's difficult to push it past 42 minutes without it feeling like it's wasting time. I find this is more and more true the older I get, too, which is possibly related to having less time as an adult, especially one with an existing massive record collection.

My ambient music experiences are almost exclusively tools deployed to aid productivity or ease anxiety, so I can certainly agree that the longer the better in that regard. I listen to ambient music to create a sort of heightened sense of space as opposed to sitting down and dedicating my time and attention to it so, to put it bluntly, I'm not really arsed about how long ambient records are, as I can dip in and out as I please.

Similarly, I can personally forgive dance albums for being long as I seldom listen to them at all, let alone as a cohesive whole, but if I were to indulge them it would almost certainly be in a social setting, since dance music naturally reminds me of spending a large chunk of my 20s going out raving and so I don't really understand the merits of listening to it alone! But dance music is also aided greatly by its particular formulas of repetition and being able to totally sink into an extended groove.

It's definitely a case of different types of repetition formulas and how much of each the average brain can tolerate in one sitting. If my aforementioned beloved Arctic Monkeys decided to drag out a handful of tracks on one of their previous albums and bring its runtime closer to 60 or even 50 minutes, that would definitely hamper my enjoyment of it somewhat, but I can happily sit down and listen to the full 1hr 3m of Sleep's "Dopesmoker" and never find myself checking the time.

boki

Quote from: purlieu on October 19, 2021, 08:35:41 PM
My favourite album is 90 minutes. My second favourite is 38. The first is an immersive ambient soundscape kind of record, the second fairly straightforward indie rock. Both are excellent.
This is it, it can really depend on the type of music.  My ADHD brain tends to struggle with a lot of stuff over 40 minutes, but then the Sugar Horse album is almost an hour because most of the songs are really long, but somehow don't feel it.  A punk album over half an hour needs to have a lot about it on the other hand.

purlieu

Quote from: The Mollusk on October 20, 2021, 12:48:45 PM
My ambient music experiences are almost exclusively tools deployed to aid productivity or ease anxiety, so I can certainly agree that the longer the better in that regard. I listen to ambient music to create a sort of heightened sense of space as opposed to sitting down and dedicating my time and attention to it so, to put it bluntly, I'm not really arsed about how long ambient records are, as I can dip in and out as I please.
I suppose I was using ambient in a very broad sense, but '90s albums like Lifeforms, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld and Selected Ambient Works Vol II all very much benefit from the 2CD format, long stretches of music that you can get lost in. Getting into FSOL at a very young age definitely helped define my taste, so 70+ minutes of completely unbroken gapless music feels like a natural setting for that kind of music to me.

As for dance music, my first ever CD purchase with my own money was an Orbital single, so it's something there are no real ties to social settings for me[nb]I generally enjoy music less when I'm around other people, to be honest.[/nb]. That said, Orbital, Underworld and the like are always varied and have plenty of downtempo stuff on their albums anyway.

kidney

Quote from: The Mollusk on October 19, 2021, 02:57:38 PM
The Knife's "Shaking the Habitual" has got to be one of the worst offenders I can think of in recent years. One of the tracks is 20 mins of just ambient space noise, total piss.

That's the best track on the album though!

JaDanketies

There Existed An Addiction to Blood by Clipping. has a  20-minute track of a piano burning at the end, which did come across as quite indulgent