Too many tracks make an album a bastard to listen to

2010 is being a seriously exciting year for music for me. Maybe that's partially because I'm paying attention to new releases more than ever this year, but there are several gems to have caught my eye already this year - it usually takes me until at least June of the next year to decide upon a top 10, but I have many candidates already. Granted, there have been some disappointments - Burzum's 'Belus' wasn't quite what I expected, but was still a very good album. Similarly, the Triptykon album, the new project from Thomas Gabriel Fischer (ex-Celtic Frost) wasn't quite as good as Celtic Frost's last album 'Monotheist', but then again, that was my album of the decade. 'Eparistera Daimones' will still be up there come the end of the year.

One trend has been bothering me though. It's that albums nowadays seem to be getting so LONG. Maybe it's just my attention span failing, or maybe it's just that I'm in one of my grindcore phases at the moment, but a lot of albums seem to be failing to hold my attention all the way through, yet I find them brilliant if I listen to them over two sessions. Take the aforementioned Triptykon opus, for instance. Coming in at a hefty 72 minutes, if I try and listen to all of it, I often find myself getting an itchy trigger finger over the 'skip' button come 19 minute closer 'The Prolonging', which thus seems an apt title.

Similarly, another, more underground gem I've enjoyed this year (thanks to -Spanner for finding it for me), Erthyrioblastosis Fetalis' 'Process Of Death' is just over an hour long. This isn't too bad normally, except it's a grindcore album. If one is to look at the classics of grindcore, 'Scum' is 31 minutes, 'Horrified' is 29 minutes, and 'World Downfall' absolutely takes the biscuit at 36 minutes. The fact that 'Process Of Death' is about half an hour longer than these is frankly worrying. Admittedly, they are somewhat underground, and my favourite grindcore release for this year, Raw Noise's 'System Never' (admittedly debatably crust punk rather than grind) clocks in at a far more reasonable 26 minutes. The thing is, that's an EP. Other grindcore releases this year that I've heard are Leng Tch'e's 'Hypomanic', 41 minutes (a bit long), and Atomski Rat's self titled debut EP, which aside from being some of the best crust/grind I've heard in a long time, is a perfect length at 18 minutes for a 19 track EP.

The thing is, while hour long plus albums are certainly acceptable for some genres, for instance funeral doom (Esoteric's recent masterpiece 'The Maniacal Vale' was just over 100 minutes long, and gripping throughout), and other slower genres, and exceptions can be made for truly spectacular albums ('Monotheist' was about 70 minutes long), when you get to underproduced goregrind, an hour is too much to ask for nearly all listeners. So really, this is a plea to musicians: don't cut out the step of cutting down all the material you've got by simply including all of it; it makes for a poorer album. Thankyou.