If you haven't noticed, EP's are kind of "the thing" these days.
One need only venture into a record store one day out of the year (say, Record Store Day), or poke around for a few minutes on Bandcamp, to see that the popularity of EP's as a viable physical product is more popular than at any other time in modern history.
To the dozens of industry jackals who slagged my prediction, whether it be over comped drinks in the soundproof VIP bunker at the Troubadour or on the ever-bitchy invite-only industry forum The Velvet Rope, allow me this brief moment to say "Suck it" and "Thanks for driving the industry into the ground in the meantime."
Thing is, even as I voiced my prediction, I did so while harboring just a wee bit of contempt for the EP; a once-mighty beast reduced to a last ditch "no zip sorting bin" for wayward rock acts and a cheap cash-in for record labels.
Even now, the mere mention of the term "EP" makes this writer think of a half-assed 12" with the band's latest single on it, a couple obvious non-LP throwaway tracks, and a live version of the first song on the EP.
It didn't used to be that way though.
In fact, for a brief shining moment between 1981 and 1983, most of the best EP's were released by bands that wound up defining the decade; Berlin, Talk Talk, the B-52's, U2, and the Pretenders, to name just a few.
Of course, one of the greatest EP's of all time remains the self-titled debut by Missing Persons in 1982, which was a slight tweaking of the band's original 1980 7" single, replacing their cover of the Doors' "Hello I Love You" with the far superior "Words".
Dale Bozzio's "Blade Runner" bikini aside, there was a mystique about the EP that belied mere sexual exploitation, leaving enough to the imagination that this consumer bought the album for no other reason than the fact that I just had to know what the damn thing sounded like.
Words
Destination Unknown
Mental Hopscotch
I Like Boys
Based on the track listing, I was grasping at vague straws, but I knew one thing:
If I didn't hear synthesizers, and soon, then my ability to judge an album based on the scantest of details isn't what I thought it was. Of course, once I dropped the needle on "Words" and felt the warm rumble of analog synth eighth notes keeping pace with some of the most furious drumming to be caught on tape, I realized that I'd had no reason to doubt myself.
I can still remember the electrical jolt that surged through my brain for those first few beautiful seconds.
By the time Dale started singing, it was if I'd been plugged into an intergalactic network of beautiful misfits that the mainstream knew nothing about.
Of course, the band would later put "Words" on their debut full-length, Spring Session M, and, with it, they were no longer a secret.
While the band would release three full-length albums for Capitol before breaking up, none pack the concise, potent punch of that first EP, which, over the course of four songs, laid out the musical template for the decade that even bands like the Cars and Foreigner would find themselves following.
Tags:
extended play