There’s been a lot of banter about the relevance of album artwork in the digital age across the metal blogsphere (starting on Metalsucks, then moving to Invisible Oranges). The conversation has generally centered around whether the fans want/need/appreciate album artwork anymore. Many folks don’t buy CD’s or vinyl any more, and those that do often just rip the music for their iPod and file the hard copy away without paying much attention to the packaging or artwork. There are of course others who view an album as a package – 10 or so songs made to be together, with cover artwork, sleeve notes, lyrics etc. – and consume as a whole.
However, in many ways, whether the music buying public want, or feel that they need artwork or not is somewhat beside the point. The fact is, aside from the artistic concerns, artwork has a very practical purpose, which means it’s unlikely to disappear any time soon.
It’s unlikely that bands are going to stop releasing songs in ‘collections’. It makes financial sense to record multiple songs in one session, not to mention that extra cost it would take to promote and market 1 song at a time. Whether you call it an EP, Album or twozzlefangler, this collection will need to be identiified by a ‘label’ – the title – so that people can identify it. But from a marketing and promotional perspective this is simply not enough. This is, after all (wether you like it or not) a product, and products need to be distinct and easily recognisable. Imagine if all that was on every washing powder box was the brand name – no logo, design, mascot, product picture, gimmick - how would you identify one from the next? How would you remember which one was recommended to you, Washomatic or Cleanomatic? Branding professionals have known about differentiators for decades, and the music industry is no different. So bands often have logos, so that people can easily pick them out and identify with them. This is our fist visual cue. But that doesn’t do a very good job of differentiating one album from the next – enter the album artwork.
Death Metal art looks like this dude
At corporate level, all the elements of the album package from the songs, to the logo, to the title to the cover image, are carefully harmonised to portray a particular theme, image, tone. This is called merchandising and it’s take VERY seriously. Merchandising can make or break a record. This merchandising is taken through to marketing – adverts, PR, press kits, live show promotion and is usually reproduced to some level as part of the live show itself.
So when you get your mate to throw together some artwork for your latest EP this is what you are doing – merchandising. It means that you have a way to visually present your collection of songs, so that people can easily identify it in a shop among a bunch of other blackened deathcore CD’s, on Amazon or iTunes Store, and when flicking through the cover flow in their MP3 library. People are more likely to remember the distinctive cover design than the obscure latin album title or your unreadable BM logo.
Read my logo mofo!
It goes further than this though. Album artwork tends to be similar within genres. If you’re a Death Metal band, you probably want to be noticed by Death Metal fans. Death Metal album covers are usually striking, disturbing and immaculately painted by some some disturbed genius. Black Metal covers are usually sparse and colourless. Next time you leaf through Metal Hammer or Terrorizer take note of which adverts you notice – somehow it mysteriously aligns with your music taste…wonder why that is?
In the digital age, where visuals are everything, I’d say that album artwork is more important than ever. Whether you spent hours gazing at it (like I did with Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time artwork when I was a teenager), or merely used it as a reminder when looking for particular album, it had an impact on you, and fulfilled a vital need.
I don’t often act on (or in many cases listen to) unsolicited review requests that arrive via Myspace mail, but the one I received from Fuck the Facts caught my eye. Firstly, they actually bothered to personalise the message, secondly they offered to give out their tracks to anyone who would review (or in any way promote) them, and thirdly they mentioned that they were self releasing. I get countless grammatically dubious mails via Myspace (not to mention the ones via direct email, blog comments, etc.) that say something like “nice profile, hows trix check us out if you get a sec , if not that’s cool” (that’s a real one from a band who shall not be named) and expect me to bother spending time listening to, and reviewing their band when they can’t be bothered to even formally introduce themselves!
By chance I also saw Cosmo Lee’s review on Invisible Oranges so I decided to check them out. The music is an amusing mix of early Dillinger Escape Plan (minus the jazz/spazz) with elements of black and death metal (most notably Morbid Angel) which could broadly be described as Grindcore. A must for fans of Ted Maul and their ilk. It’s short, violent and to the point. Excellent stuff.
What’s more interesting is the way they are releasing it. They’re doing a limited run of 500 copies of the EP on vinyl, the packaging of which is hand made. Anyone who orders it gets a code to go download the the MP3’s for free. This is enterprising and very forward thinking and anyone who’s spent any time reading my overly impassioned musings on self releasing will know that I approve. It also has a real personal touch that will make the hard copies very collectable. The download mechanism is handled by a site called Bandcamp, which is totally new to me. You can stream your music and offer both free and paid downloads (including an option to off ‘pay what you want’) and well as generally promote your band. It’s an interesting service and one that I’m going to write a bit more about – watch this space.
So go give Fuck the Facts a leg up, because this this sort of behaviour should be rewarded!
For the uninitiated, Cloudkicker is one Ben Sharp from Columbus, Ohio. By day, Ben is a salary earning career man, by night a musical mad scientist. Cloudkicker’s percussive, polyrhythmic progressive metal is put together entirely on Sharp’s computer, with all instruments (and drums programmed) by the man himself. Cloudkicker’s music cost Sharp diddly squat to record.
Sharp releases short bursts of Cloudkicker’s music, given away free, to little fanfare. Currently there is 1 album and 3 EP’s, the latest of which is called ]]][[[ is both a continuation of Cloudkicker's trademark 'melodic Meshuggah' cacophany and a progression into both heavier and more melodic territories. Tracks 1 and 2 (which in keeping with the theme of grammatical symbols are named # and %) work as a single sprawling post-rocker, while track3 $ can only be described as post-thrash - frenetic, complex and stunningly original. Mr. Sharp kindly agreed to give me an interview.
Most would describe you as post-rock/metal, but you really stand out from the usual long song, slow build monotony. How would you describe your music?
I would describe it as "listenable". Anything beyond that is up to other people's musical sensibilities.
Do you consider yourself to be a part of any ‘scene’?
I consider myself a part of the "contributing member of society" scene, which is pretty exclusive as far as bands go.
You released 2 EP’s in a 12 month period. Was it a conscious decision to do that rather than release a full album?
I prefer putting out shorter releases more frequently. I get bored listening to an hour of instrumental music, and this way I always have something relatively new out.
Each of your releases has a distinct personality. Is this by design, or perhaps a reflection of your mood at the time?
Definitely the latter. I'm really moody when it comes to writing music, and I don't want to get caught up in some sort of creative rut where I'm ALWAYS writing within the confines of a certain style. Honestly, I'm getting bored of writing what amounts to being melodic Meshuggah but I still enjoy writing in odd time signatures, so I think applying that to some different styles will be interesting.
The title and song names of your current EP ]]][[[ only contain grammatical symbols. What is the significance of this?
Just mixing it up a bit. Usually I get a theme in my head or I'll be interested in a certain subject when I name songs but I wanted the music to be the focal point on this one. Also laziness.
Who’s the guy on the cover of ]]][[[ and why did you put him there?
I did a Google image search one time for the word “Black” and his picture popped up. I saved it on my computer and haven’t been able to find it since. I have no idea who he is, he could have committed mass infanticide for all I know. He just seems like a pretty solid dude, so why not put him on an album cover. I did color his garb though.
Your music almost seems defined by its rhythm. When you’re writing, is rhythm created before riff?
Sometimes. I’ve written some drum parts in the shower, but 70% of the stuff I come up with while noodling around on the guitar.
Have you considered releasing your music on physical formats and charging for it?
Eh. Sounds like a lot of effort. Some people seem to get really bent out of shape about the fact that they can’t buy a physical copy of the CD, and I think they’re probably somewhat OCD about it. I think it would be funny to sell CDs but have the artwork make it look like a regular blank CD-R.
Have you/will you ever consider making Cloudkicker into a full band?
I used to play shows back when I first started writing music for Cloudkicker in 2005-2006 and lived in Los Angeles. Since then I’ve taken on a career and moved to Ohio; I haven’t yet felt the need to hunt down capable musicians, practice, and put shows together. Instead I put that time and effort into writing music.
Well that’s good enough for me. Sharp’s chosen method of distribution, and the fact that he gives his music away free of charge, affords him this flexibility – the fans have no ownership over Cloudkicker, Sharp doesn’t need us, and thus artistic expression is allowed to flow unaltered by the malign influence of money. While the music industry bleats about loss of their poorly earned riches and foretell of the death of culture, Sharp and his ilk are out there proving that we no longer need these corporate wastes of space.
Cloudkicker’s entire back catalogue can be downloaded in its entirety for free here.
Things were going just hootingly for the music industry until someone invented MP3’s and spoilt the party. This advent was a veritable boon for the music listening public for whom music became more accessible and portable. It also became cheaper (or, in many cases free) and they weren’t tied to buying albums any more – they could choose which tracks to buy off an album leaving vast volumes of unwanted filler behind. This left the music industry, used to cleaning up by selling full, physical albums at exorbitant prices, somewhat out of pocket. The music industry has bleated, encrypted and litigated its way though the intervening decade before finally deciding to apply a bit of ‘creative’ thinking to the situation. “If they want files for these computer contraption thingies” they say, “let’s give them files”.
Several groups are developing new rich music media file formats that hope to take the act of listening to music into the multimedia age (apparently it didn’t arrive there yet). The resulting formats are, somewhat predictably, predominantly based around full albums. The music industry wants us to buy albums. Albums, they say, are meant to be listened to as a whole. Well that may be true if you’re Mastodon, but considerably less so if you’re Peter André. Reading between the lines of the industry rhetoric it’s clear the bottom line is the order of the day – albums are a lot more profitable. Each of these attempts to recreate the experience of an album in digital format and enrich it further with other extras. So the ‘race’ is on to become the next ubiquitous file format. There are 3 contenders in this valhallan battle. Here I’ll cover each separately.
The iTunes LP
To be fair to Apple, who have benefited no end from the digital revolution, there are no smoke and mirrors surrounding their attempt to digitise the LP experience (hence the name). They clearly want to sell more albums. They also realise that the music industry do also, but they have other ideas as we shall discover. Launching an iTunes LP file submerses you in a multimedia world themed around the artist and album. Along with the music (at standard ACC superior 192kbps quality) you get music videos, custom visualisations, album artwork and lyrics. All this in a swanky interactive environment inside iTunes. Although the music files will run on Apple’s iPod or iPhone range, the full multimedia experience won’t, although it may run on the forthcoming chocolate teapot known as the iPad. Inside the file is an assortment of images and Javascript that, although fathomable for someone with some web development skill, is poorly documented and probably out of reach of all but the majors.
Being the only format already to make it market (launched August 2009) would seem to give them a head start on the pack. However, this evidently hasn’t translated into a resounding success, which is perhaps a sign of the music buying public’s nonchalance regarding such a format, but more likely to be related to the fact that the music industry has something else on the burner and are thus not wasting time releasing on iTunes LP’s. Which bring me on to…
CMX
Dubbed CMX (Connected Media Experience – snappy eh?) the music industry’s apparoach to this concept was to club together and throw a bunch of their ill-gotten cash at it. Originally scheduled to launch around the same time as the iTunes LP, presumably to cut them off at the pass, this has now been delayed until ‘quarter 2 2010’. We don’t know the precise details but we do know just enough to say that it is conceptually virtually the same as the iTunes LP, however, already there are obvious flaws that hobble it out of the starting blocks. Firstly, it’s Flash based, so it won’t play on an iPod, and initially probably not on any portable media player. Given the ubiquity of the last decades must have electronic accessory it’s hard to see how CMX can catch on. Secondly, it looks likely that the music will only be playable as part of the CMX file. Which means that it won’t function in iTunes, and you can’t put them on your MP3 player either!
This is still speculation given that the details of CMX have yet to be released. However, given that Apple are unlikely to support this format, and the music industry will not be quick to forsake a format that they’ve poured a load of cash into we would seem to be at a stalemate. But there is a 3rd way…
MusicDNA
The new kid on the block it may be, but MusicDNA was created by one of the very arch-criminals responsible for this bloody mess in the first place – Karlheinz Brandenburg co-creator of the MP3. Unlike the iTunes LP and CMX, MusicDNA isn’t merely a repackaging of the digital file format into an album like experience, it has a whiff of the future about it. You see MusicDNA has smarts. It carries a bunch of metadata as per the MPEG-7 standard which carry information on stuff like tempo, instrumentation, mood as well as all the usual stuff, all captured at the point of encoding. This will allow applications like iTunes and services like Pandora and Last.fm to create weird, wonderful, and most importantly, powerful ways to recommend and playlist stuff for you. Also, the MusicDNA file is alive. It contains dynamic components that update when the file is opened. This will allow artists to include stuff like tour dates and blog posts that would always be up to date. You can copy (read pirate) MusicDNA files, and they will play just fine, however this dynamic content will no longer function, a feature which the makers say will help guard against piracy. I’m not so sure.
MusicDNA comes with a plethora of applications to encode and run, as well as the facilities for developers to build their own applications to make use of all its magical features (like iPhone and Facebook apps). It’s also MP3 backwards compatible which means it should play on anything that will play MP3’s (although I’ll believe this when I see it). Although the format made it to market (well, it’s not quite in the wild yet, but has ‘launched’) before the tardy CMX format it currently has no backing from the major labels (although a couple of independent labels are on board) and is unlikely to get it until CMX is abandoned or fails. So, short of a sudden upswell of public demand, MusicDNA would seem to be at a bit of handicap.
The question is, does the world really need a rich, album based file format? Albums are more and more becoming the bastion of hardcore fans, music lovers/collectors and audiophiles. In all cases, owning a physical copy of the album is usually the order of the day. In the latter two, audio quality is a key concern, something that none of these formats tackle. Barring the spaceage extras that accompany MusicDNA, all these extras are already available, usually offered as a DVD, with premium copies of the physical equivalents, so immediacy is all they’ve really got going for them. It’s difficult to see this becoming a Betamax vs. VHS or HD DVD vs. Blue Ray style standoff – all those formats offered features not previously available. MusicDNA is the only format with the differentiators to make it a viable alternative to the ubiquitous MP3 (and indeed AAC), but are these value adds really enough to sway the hardcore as well as change the general record buying public’s buying habits? It seems unlikely.
In addition to this, there are signs that the MP3 itself could soon become obsolete as vast numbers of music consumers are moving to increasingly mobile streaming services like (music industry sponsored) Spotify.
The final nail in these foetus’s coffins is the fact that these files will almost certainly be charged at a premium. Given that the music buying public are hard pressed to pay anything for their music, it seems a stretch to expect them to fork out more. When you add to that the fact that, due to the extra effort and expense (not to mention expertise) involved in producing these formats, smaller record labels and self releasers will unlikely bother, these formats would seem to be a lost cause.
In the end, all this talk of recreating the album experience is somewhat moot. It’s unlikely that CD’s and vinyl are likely become obsolete any time soon and simply recreating this experience in digital form is fulfilling a need that doesn’t exist for anyone other than the record labels. Albums have a place in the future of music consumption, but it’s not the form that the music takes that is going to evolve, it’s very way we discover and experience music. I’ll tackle this in subsequent articles.
Posted in Album, Reviews on February 3rd, 2010 by Alex
If I handed over an unlabeled copy of Myth and said “what you have here is the lost Opeth album. You know, the one that was recorded just after Blackwater Park and was collaboration with Katatonia but was never released” the less acquainted Opeth acolytes out there may well believe me on hearing it.
It’s impossible to talk about Stone Circle without mentioning Opeth – their debt to the Swedish masters is plain. However, the Brighton quartet aren’t simply a carbon copy. While Opeth tend towards 70’s prog groove and bleak, black metal atmospherics, Stone Circle bludgeon us with brutal death reminiscent of Morbid Angel melting into plaintive Katatonia-esque goth rock. Lacking the history and maturity of either band Myth doesn’t traverse the aggressive and melancholic as smoothly as Opeth and lacks the gothic majesty of Katatonia. That said there is some exemplary song writing here – moments of crushing heaviness and emotionally charged melody knitted together with a dark lyrical narrative. Epic, progressive and complex, Myth reaches musical highs most of their contemporise can only dream of.
Any criticism seems harsh when you consider that Stone Circle are unsigned Myth is entirely self released. This seems unjust given that the labels will rush out to sign 2nd rate carbon copies of bands who sell a couple of thousand units. The fact that a band of Stone Circle’s quality hasn’t been signed yet is as clear a sign of the skittishness of the music industry currently as you’ll see. Myth is accomplished and genuinely compelling. Stone Circle will need to step out from Opeth’s stately shadow to really stand out, but with the talent on display here I can’t imagine that this will be too difficult.
Like a slimy, oozing spectre crawling out from the fetid depths of a swamp, Thee Big Black issue 3 has arrived. As if it wasn’t enough to offer another 20 odd pages of dark majesty entirely free, we’ve managed to beg/borrow/steal a couple of mp3’s from the marvelous Stone Circle and sludgetastic Funeral Hag for your enjoyment that you’ll find lurking in the download file. This month it’s a veritable extravaganza of unearthly delights, including an interview with Sons of Alpha Centauri and a piece on the the Triffids vs The Middle Class by yours truly. You need this, so go get it tiger!
