Dear
Beck
The Beatles
Radiohead
Nada Surf
and others
(what, you may ask yourself, do these artists share?),
Although I appreciate silence as much as the next person, the pseudo-hidden "track" is neither cool nor amusing. It may be artsy to put minutes of silence onto the end of the last song on your album(s), just to have a semi-coherent loop, keyboard section, ambient fog, etc., but it is helping me none in the entertainment department. Hidden tracks, while more tolerable and less pretentious, are still undesirable and, as a rule, never as good as the main tracks.
Thank you.
The exception:
ReplyDeleteFIVE IRON FRENZY HIDDEN TRACKS RULE.
-Matt
I agree with the above statement.
ReplyDeleteThe first encounter I had with a hidden track was on Nirvana's Nevermind. It's just a noisy mess of punk/grunge trash (although I guess you could describe their "real" songs that way - zing!). But I remember discovering it and all the kids talking about it like it was some kind of government secret.
I'm trying to think of a good example of a hidden track ... oh, all the ones on Travis' The Man Who are excellent. I often found myself manually searching over and over just to listen to them.
I think better than that, though, is the hidden track on Losing Streak which is actually before the first song. You have to search back about 1:30 and you hear Howard J. Reynolds tell a story about his more promiscuous days, and afterwards the boys ask him to identify himself, and he utters the famous opening line of the CD. Really brilliant of them to think of that, and amazing that CD technology would allow it.