Dark Was The Night (review) and buying Vinyl without digital downloads (Rant)

I bought Dark Was the Night a couple weeks back on vinyl – it was sort of an impulse buy, and the vinyl was $28 while the CD was $15, but I got it anyway. I took it home, opened it up, and discovered that despite my extra $13 expenditure, the package did not come with a digital download.

Which takes me to my second point first, and then I’ll talk about the record.

No, let’s talk about the record now. It’s great. Here are the reasons why.

a) The National’s “So Far Around the Bend” is my favorite song of 2009 so far. I haven’t any idea why, except it just sounds… right. Upon arriving home from Chicago last week on the first 60-degree day and the true arrival of spring in Minneapolis, I was driving over the 35W bridge (which is still fun to drive over – new feeling) in the bright sunshine and this song came on the radio. Every time I hear the song, I want to go listen to the whole record.

b) Sufjan Stevens has a ten-minute track that’s very interestingly out of character, but also very much in character. This is to say, it sounds a bit like his first couple of recordings, the music going anywhere he wants it to, including large pauses and noisy crashing dissonance.

c) The New Pornographers do a cover of an A.C. Newman song (“Hey, Snow White”) that culminates pretty much everything I like about both A.C. Newman and the New Pornographers all in one three minute track – drama, big choruses with lots of vocal tracks, and a strange sense of comfortable sugar intake… It’s not too sweet, just sweet enough.

d) And really, practically each track is like that. The normal expectation of a compilation release is a bunch of critically touted groups doing strange sloppy covers, or throwing an outtake into the mix. Instead, Dark Was the Night is a collection of songs that each artist would be wise to build an album around – for the most part; they are quintessentially the essence of what makes each group unique, interesting, and relevant. AND, they all play well together. (Mostly.)

e) The money goes to charity!

So go buy it already, if you haven’t already.

And here’s my second point, which could easily be a separate blog post but I’m on a roll now so I’m just going to keep going. VINYL RELEASES SHOULD HAVE DIGITAL DOWNLOADS! Or at least, the option of a digital download for, I don’t know, $3 extra. Essentially, I am done with CD’s. They are cheap, yes – typically a couple bucks more than download only, which I am happy to pay for the artwork and the physical sensation of having the album in hand (it helps in a High Fidelity sort of tracking methodology as well – to remember where you were and what was going on when you bought a certain album is at least 25 % of the draw). However, CD’s just don’t feel right anymore, and their recession has been well documented. Vinyl, on the other hand, is experiencing a modest uptick in popularity – helped, I’m sure, by more and more new releases getting issued both on vinyl and CD. The record is cooler, right? It feels heavier – there’s more room for art work – there’s some sense of “value,” that perhaps if no one else buys the album, or maybe they’ll all destroy their copies accidently, and then your record will be worth something. This may well be as untrue as my sense that the baseball cards I spent thousands of dollars on between the ages of 9-16 would be worth more (try $0.04 a card on average) in the years that followed, but the feeling persists. I am making an investment. I will hold onto this for awhile.

All those good feelings! Except, you can only listen to it in your living room, or where the record player is. Given that the trend is unmistakably swinging back towards vinyl, and given that most people have shown that they’ll spend an extra $2-5 to get the record (over the CD), why not just add another $2 onto that and guarantee a digital download with every record? Some have it, some don’t, and some don’t inform you either way – it’s like opening a plastic Easter Egg that you get from the mall and finding the quarter you paid to get the egg in the first place on the inside.

No, it isn’t like that. That doesn’t even make sense. But you get my point.

Here’s what I’m saying, really.

a) Buy Dark Was the Night.

b) On vinyl.

c) But don’t expect a digital download.