Metal Reviews

Another attempt to bring some musical discussion onto the boards:

It has greatly annoyed me that album dates are always their first release. Unlike classical music, where a composition is dated by when the composition was finished.

Paintings and other works of art are also dated when they are finished, not when they are sold for the first time, that would be rather ridiculous, wouldn't it be?

Now where do labels take the brutal guts from, to date albums not by when they were recorded, but by when some unrelated fucktard started selling them? Arrg!!!

Discuss!

In classical music the important thing is the composer, not the band. The band are just some schmoes that are making one of many variations on a work of art that is already created. In fact much of the time they are merely trying to reproduce the original as exactly as possible. So in other words, we care more about the writing than the performance.

In pop/rock/jazz and of course metal the reverse is true. The band is more important than the composer. Most compositions are designed to be recorded by a specific band, which the composer is usually a part of. The composition is defined by that bands performance of it, not in the collection of notes on paper. I think jazz is the best example. Take a song that everyone plays, like A Night in Tunisia. That song is defined differently each time it is performed, so it's more appropriate to date it according to each individual performance rather than when Dizzy Gillespie wrote it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you're going to date something, do it by when the article is "defined". A faithful rendition of some classical piece is simply reproducing something that was already defined centuries ago. But a performance by a metal band on an album made in 1984 defines itself according to the composition on paper, AND the bands performance itself, even if the song was written years before.

Yes, defined! That's really different than "released". That's why I think albums should be dated by recording date.

Haha oh yes I completely failed to notice that you said "release date" instead of "recording date" in the OP...

They should be like books, where inside the cover you have

"First written....
First published...
Second publishing...
Bla bla bla"

A bunch of albums have like a "recorded on Jan 1st and Jan 2nd 2006"... not all of them though :O

isn't it mostly classical that was written before there was anything called vinyl, tapes and cds that is dated after when it was finished? Mozart never threw a release party ... only general parties, with cocaine and Champagne, besides it doesn't really matter - the works he wrote was played almost same week they were finished, if u understand what i mean.. Can't imaging (classical) composers nowadays would date it after the date they finished the work, though, at least not all of them... okay, i can. But cd's etc, are always dated according to when they were released, right? If you wrote music for musicals, operas ect, and it didn't get released on cd, then it would be dated according to when it was written, in public...
is that what you mean?


But i partly agree with you that it can be annoying. But only if the album was released in the next year or several years after for that matter. Don't care for months.


The way you wrote your first post... i think you should replace Andy Rooney on 60 minutes

I see what Misha means, but its not really important. I doubt bands care if a song they wrote in August 1995, recorded in December that year and released March 1996 is tagged as a 1996 song, you know? For more extreme time lapses, its usually made clear when the songs were roughly written/recorded - re-released demos and such. If bands care enough about the date they wrote the music they note it in the liner notes (like Darkthrone) or their websites or soemthing.

I swear I was reading this exact same topic somewhere else not long ago...

Anyway, I also wish there was more emphasis placed on recording dates. I can understand why classical is the way it is, and I can understand that with more contemporary styles, there's an emphasis on release dates. These (release dates) are, after all, important and not just because it's the date we look forward to. Keep in mind that you're not getting a painting or a sculpture here, you are essentially getting (a pressing of) reproductions of the original. And it's not just the music, you're getting the artwork and packaging, etc.

...But I also wish there was (always) notation included for writing and recording dates. Even if it ends up just being inside the sleeve somewhere, I'd still like to know. Then again, as I mentioned before, you're getting more than just the music, so perhaps a date for the design and artwork would be important to some as well.

-Tyrion