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article on the dance music album
insightful? or retarded?
from: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2...olution_is.html
The dance album format of the future
At long last producers have stopped trying to shoehorn dance tracks into a rock album format. They're onto something good
Of course he's a clever swine: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy
The solution is at an experimental stage and some of the results have yet to be peer reviewed in the relevant academic journals (Mixmag, Fact, that Earplug ezine). But after years of beating its head against a solid studio door, it seems that dance music might finally have the artist album cracked.
In the end the answer was devastatingly simple. LCD Soundsystem, Ricardo Villalobos and Luke Solomon have all recently delivered albums that disprove one of music's fundamental laws (that all dance music albums are crap) with the gallingly prosaic tactic of mixing their own album tracks together as if they were a continuous DJ-mix.
Genius isn't it?
For years dance music producers have been trying and failing to shoehorn their work into the album format dictated by rock. Rock albums work to a traditional 12 song pattern: declarative opener; mildly experimental third track; showpiece ballad every six songs; jaunty parting shot. Dance music, unless you're the Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack or Daft Punk (all of whom the purists would argue don't count), is implacably, irretrievably unsuited to that format.
The 12" single or the stand-alone MP3 is dance music's modus operandi. These are individual tracks with a specific basic function. They're meant to make people dance and are aimed primarily at club DJs. Which means they're built in such a way - beats first, hi-hat brought in after 16 bars, bass introduced, wonky digital motif begins etc - that makes them sound completely dull when they're compiled - naked, ugly and embarrassed to be there - as separate tracks on an album.
That is why we have Djs. They mix out the boring bits at the beginning and end and weave together a knowing, self-referential montage of the riffs, patterns, hooks, peaks, troughs, textures and atmospheres, as opposed to traditional verse-chorus songs.
What's that? You reckon if this takes off all dance music albums will be streamlined, one-paced snooze-a-thons? Rubbish! The whole problem, whether we're talking about UNKLE or Phats and Small, Sasha or Black Strobe, has been dance music's lack of self-confidence, with producers seeking to invest their albums with rock-like variations in tempo and texture. It leads to all sorts of problems with guest vocalists, rock mannerisms and guitars, ill-advised detours into alien genres and highfalutin concept albums. Concerned that they need to vary the speed and mood in the abrupt way a rock album would, every dance music album since 1988 has contained a limp ballad or its dance music substitute, the ambient soundscape. All of them total nonsense.
Contrast this with Robots on Luke Solomon's forthcoming The Difference Engine. Whilst keeping the beats steady, he loops an angelic croon round and around into eight minutes of the most pointedly emotional music you will hear all year, before seamlessly blending it into the next, much more upbeat track. Similarly, where would Ricardo Villalobos's Andruic and Japan (12 minutes of demented drums and gibberish about chicken giblets) fit on a normal album? On Fabric 36, however, it seems like a very natural mid-set breather amid the sinuous minimal techno that surrounds it. Some of those tracks, incidentally, are mere two-minute snippets which Villalobos quite rightly felt under no pressure to develop into "proper" songs as he might have done were they not interwoven in a continuous mix. LCD Soundystem's 45.33, meanwhile, with its unorthodox forward momentum and final implosion, unfolds with a naturalness that most dance music albums fundamentally lack.
James Murphy is a clever swine, of course, and has produced great albums in both forms - traditional and mixed. But he's a one-off. For the rest of dance music, the message is clear: the original continuous mix, not the track-by-track album, is the long-play format of the future.
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