Food For Landfills

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Last week, Fatboi Sharif and Duncecap released Psychedelics Wrote the Bible. It’s a bewildering peek off right of reality, a look into the staging behind all that we know to be “true.” Sharif, the self-proclaimed “Garden State gargoyle of Elaborate Literature,” delivers a haunting experience through both his words and delivery, all set to Duncecap’s unnerving soundscape. Listening to it is like remembering the color red for the first time while staring at your fingers soaked in your blood. It’s a horror show. It’s a revelation.

It's only eleven minutes long.

Technically, 11:16—about four minutes shorter than the Circle Jerks’ landmark album Group Sex; my personal mark for how short an album can be and still be called an “album” (though, if you scored the vinyl, you get Duncecaps instrumentals on side B, which doubles the runtime). 

But it’s refreshing. I want it to be longer, but I’m glad it isn’t.

The current No. 1 album in the U.S.—Eminem’s The Death of Slim Shady—has a runtime of 1:04:37, with three skits and seven songs between the 4-5 minutes. The previous No.1, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, went over an hour (or two hours, when you add in The Anthology). Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter almost hit the 80-minute mark.

Those runtimes used to be reserved for rock operas and classical symphonies. The fuck does a pop album think it has any business being an hour long?  

Most of the albums I picked for my 2024 halfway checkpoint were around 30 minutes long; only two flirted with a 45-minute length. Blessed is the artist who doesn’t burn up all of the spotlight and exits the stage before the curfew kicks in. Leave ‘em wanting more, right?

It’s not like I don’t enjoy a longer piece of music. My love of Frank Zappa is public, and Dopesmoker is still an enjoyable experience when I want to chill. But it feels like these albums are running long for no reason other than to maximize steaming numbers.

Musicians were once servants to the unnegotiable limitations of these distribution systems. You only get 44 minutes on an LP and a CD holds around 74 minutes (if you want it not to sound like shit). Radio wouldn’t play your six-minute opus when they could run three 2-minute songs in that spot along with commercials. 

Streaming fucked all that up. Now, there are no repercussions to putting out hour-long albums brimming with filler. No increased retail price to cover the double-LP production costs. No returned CDs clogging up the USED bins. None of that.

At this point, it’s expected for everyone to go big—let’s get the stans to stream all 22 songs so we can overwhelm the Top 10 on the Hot 100. Fuck it! Nothing matters.

And if you do have a short album, you can overwhelm the audience with physical releases. ENHYPEN’s Romance: Untold debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 due to its  “17 different CD variants, all containing collectible paper ephemera like photocards, stickers and a poster, as well as two vinyl editions.”

The K-pop group isn’t the only band guilty of this practice: every AAA-level artist puts out a dozen variants of the same album. We all know that. But when is it going to be too much? Does the balloon need to pop? Or can we stop before we’re swallowed in a landslide of unsold 180-gram vinyl pressings of mid?

Probably not. The industry is trying to squeeze every last dime out before the party’s over. As that happens, I’ll play with my eleven minutes of weirdness on repeat as I watch the dumpsters and thrift stores overflow.

I know I’m tempting fate by writing an essay about artists putting out filler; hopefully, this didn’t waste your time.

Steel Tipped Dove teamed with Fatboi Sharif for last year’s DECAY. In 2023, Steel Tipped Dove released All The Weight Feathers Don’t Have, which you can listen to here.

Jack White gave away his new No Name album for free. It’s pretty good.

Semi-Famous was once a fictional band at the heart of John “Jughead” Pierson’s meta-fictional memoir, Weasels In A Box. Now, they’re real and they have a new album: Destroy Ourselves.

I would also recommend the following bands: Plosivs, Sultans, Night Marchers and the entire Hot Snakes catalog (for reasons I’ll get into in a bit).

 I interviewed Swami John Reis about his new band and album: Swami & The Bed of Nails, All This Awaits You…

Reis is best known for being in Rocket From The Crypt, Pitchfork and all the bands I mentioned above (plus a really wonderful surf album he put out with The Blind Shake). This new album contains songs that sprung as a tributary from the last Hot Snakes writing session. Sadly, Reis’ bandmate and dear friend Rick Froberg passed away in 2023.

We discussed how All This Awaits You was part of the grieving and healing process, whether or not there will be another Bed of Nails record, and the many layers to the new song “Ketchup, Mustard And Relish.” That’s coming to New Noise magazine next week.

 Thank you for subscribing to Open Up and Read, the newsletter from music journalist Jason Brow. It’s free (and whenever it’s not, it’ll be cheap). Support by telling others to subscribe. You can also toss a few dollars his way via Ko-Fi. Be kind to cats. Music is the best.