12/17/2023 0 Comments Black sabbath changes big mouthAnd yet post-punk made huge additions to the album canon, from PiL’s Metal Box to Wire’s 154, Joy Division’s Closer to The Human League’s Dare. Punk blasted that conceit: the terse, three-chord 7” had come to drive out the gatefold-sleeved double album. Progressive rock took the album format to the edge of pomposity, eschewing the pop single as puerile and ephemeral. In the early 70s, Stevie Wonder made a series of synth-based albums whose innovation was foundational for future R&B. Pink Floyd, The Who, and The Velvet Underground also made LPs informed by a conscious, art school sensibility.īy the 70s, soul artists, led by Marvin Gaye, were breaking away from the 60s hit factories. The Beatles retreated to the studio, ostensibly because of the futility of playing live but also to mark their transition from pop sensations to artists, making the most of studio technology to expand their songwriting palette, offering a listening experience that was literary, formally adventurous and sonically colourised. To play the album right through to closing track Caroline No and the mournful toll of the train bell at its fadeout, is to feel this. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds marked the passage from surfer innocence to a more adult, introspective consciousness borne of experience. Other artists such as Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane would go on to be defined as much by their album releases as their playing.īy the 60s, rock’n’roll became less of a 45rpm jukebox experience thanks to the arrival of a new generation of visionary composers such as Lennon & McCartney, Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan. Two years later, he released Kind Of Blue, a masterpiece of modal jazz which demonstrates that the long-player wasn’t merely a matter of quantity that it provided a cumulative experience greater than the sum of its tracks. Miles Davis pulled together sessions from 19 into the retrospective statement of intent that was 1957’s The Birth Of The Cool. Artists like Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker demanded a new level of attentiveness. Jazz, meanwhile, was undergoing its own postwar evolution, graduating in seriousness, no longer just the stuff of dancehall entertainment. Its songs are like chapters dealing with different themes concerning the downside of romance – no wonder it has been described as the first “concept” album. Its cover art, featuring a lonesome Sinatra on a street corner swathed in a blue half-light, could have appeared on the front of a paperback novel. Bing Crosby, who was at the forefront of various 20th century music technologies, from the microphone to magnetic tape, was among the first artists to see his work appear on album format – Crosby Classics, a collection of his 30s recordings released by Columbia.įrank Sinatra took it further, understanding the narrative potential of the LP on In The Wee Small Hours (1955). However, it wasn’t long before more popular artists saw the potential of LPs. When the first long-playing record was introduced by Columbia Records at a press conference in New York’s Waldorf Astoria in 1948, it was considered primarily as a boon for selling classical music, whose long form had been ill-suited to the 78rpm format – the first ever long-player was a recording of a Mendelssohn concerto.
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