Hear Me Out: Rise Of The Rationed Album, Part 1

Ah, the double album. The ultimate artistic statement. When your vision absolutely, positively cannot be confined to the restraints of a single platter. Over the years, we've seen countless artists try to tiptoe down this slippery slope, and only a few have made it to the bottom without grass stains on the ass of their jeans.

The double album's meaning has been warped and twisted so many times in the last half century that it's often confusing when trying to determine what counts as a double album or not. When the compact disc raised the maximum length on one disc, many double albums technically became single albums; likewise, many single albums recorded since are so long that they would have undoubtedly been doubles in the original vinyl age.

With the albums on this list, though, it's not necessary to bicker over the rules. These albums aren't like the others.

You may have noticed an emerging trend in music; I most definitely have. This fall, several artists are releasing new albums; that goes without saying. But, take a closer look at the upcoming releases from Green Day, Down, Stone Sour, and Coheed and Cambria. These four bands have all decided that they have more to say than can fit on a single album. And all four have decided that, rather than throw everything at their fans at once, they should dole their vision out periodically. Green Day is releasing three albums worth of material between September and January, while Stone Sour and Coheed are splitting their double albums down the middle and spacing the halves' releases six months apart. Meanwhile, Down is planning to release their fourth album as four EPs over the coming months and/or years. Not to mention Red Hot Chili Peppers, who have taken 18 songs that weren't good enough for I'm With You and set out to release them serially as a series of nine 7” singles during the course of the rest of the year.

With so many bands employing this strategy at once, it got me thinking about the ones who've done it before. If it seems like an extraordinarily high amount of serial releases, it's because it hasn't happened all that often before. Take double albums being released separately as two albums on the same day (see Guns N' Roses, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits) out of the equation and you'll see that there have been only slightly more serialized releases over the past fifteen years than there are slated for release this fall.

We'll get around to what that might mean later. First, here's a handful of examples of serially released double albums from history and why they did (and didn't) work:

Metallica: Load/Reload

There are earlier examples of double albums split into separate releases, with the highest profile of them being Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion albums in 1991. And, if you want to get technical, Load and Reload weren't completely recorded during the exact same sessions. However, these two albums, released seventeen months apart in 1996-97, were originally conceived as a double album. All 27 songs were written for the most part but, rather than finish everything and make their fans wait even longer for new material (at the time of Load's release it had been close to five years since their 1991 self titled album, an unprecedented wait for Metallica fans at the time), they chose to fill one album to its maximum allowance and release it to quell anticipation while they finished up the rest (at 78:59, Load boasts the absolute maximum running time for a compact disc without potential quality problems; The Outlaw Torn actually had to be edited for inclusion).

With fans as restless as they were, splitting the two halves also guaranteed there wouldn't be an abnormally long wait between releases. Of course, we all know now that after Reload, fans had to suffer through nearly six years waiting for the official follow-up (and many testify that the suffering started long before Load and hasn't stopped since, but that's a whole other story).

Another benefit of the staggered release was that fans would have had to digest some 155 minutes of new material at once had they chose to go ahead with the original plan. Load and Reload already boast a glut of good songs that have been overlooked thanks to them being drops in the Load bucket (okay, that was a little gross and unintentional); you never hear people talk about Bleeding Me or Where The Wild Things Are when discussing Metallica's finer moments, and that's shameful.

Now we're getting to the core of where Load and Reload failed Metallica and, generally, where double albums almost always fail their makers. With so much material, it's a herculean task to take anything substantial from it as a listener; over time, we'll pick out our favourites, sure. But, to absorb such a massive tracklist and not take exception with the inclusion of some of those songs is an impossible favour for a band to ask of their fans. Without a connecting narrative or otherwise proper sense of flow, most double albums are nothing more than a bunch of wet noodles being thrown at a wall, leaving it up to the listener which ones stick.

Load and Reload have had to saddle a lot of disdain; part of it is due to the massive risk Metallica took in straying from their thrash roots, while much of it has been heaped on retroactively through the benefit of a new generation of haters' hindsight. But, at the time, they were coldly calculated and boldly executed experiments, and ones that I can't fault them for undertaking. 

Radiohead: Kid A/Amnesiac

Following up an all-time watermark album like OK Computer must have driven Radiohead bonkers. Thom Yorke developed severe depression in its wake, and the band nearly called it quits. However, with more to say, they soldiered on. Coming in October of 2000, Kid A turned everything on its head just like OK Computer had done three years prior. Its heavy electronic tension and drastically scaled back guitars marked another in Radiohead's long line of evolutions, and ushered in a new piece of gristle for the mainstream to gnash its teeth upon. It was also a bitterly divisive album among fans who couldn't determine whether the new direction was born of brilliance or lunacy.

It was seemingly divisive for the band as well, as nine months later Amnesiac was released, an album comprised of additional songs from the same recording sessions. Placing Kid A at the musical centre of the puzzle, Amnesiac skirted its artistic edges. Traditional instrumentation was more prevalent on some tracks, particularly the piano and drum jazz fusion beauty Pyramid Song and guitar-driven pleasers I Might Be Wrong and Knives Out. But, it also went to bizarre places even Kid A wouldn't go, like the swirling industro-alien nightmare Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors and backmasked panic soundtrack Like Spinning Plates.

Without Kid A as a point of comparison, Amnesiac is a sprawling mess of sounds. Its diversity plots against it, making it an uneven affair that's nearly impossible to enjoy front-to-back, even amongst fans. However, when supplemented with Kid A, one can more fully appreciate the scope of what Radiohead was trying to accomplish in the recording sessions that yielded these albums. Would it have worked better as a proper, simultaneously released double album? Again, there's the abundance of songs to consider; it may have been commercial suicide to ask fans to take in all 21 songs at once. However, as is the case with most albums that grow too big for their britches, the best songs on Kid A and Amnesiac rank up there with Radiohead's finest moments, even OK Computer.

System Of A Down: Toxicity/Steal This Album!

This entry is unique to the list in that the latter half was presumably never intended to be released. Toxicity was a big time breakthrough for System Of A Down, going multi-platinum and propelling their oddball nu-metal to the rock stratosphere following its September 2001 release. As is the case with a majority of bands, a wealth of additional songs were recorded during the Toxicity sessions but not included on the album. The story could have ended there, but with internet leaks becoming increasingly common, we all know that it didn't.

When an album's worth of unreleased demos was leaked in late 2001 under the title Toxicity II, S.O.A.D. were understandably upset. Not only were fans listening to songs they hadn't intended on releasing, they were listening to unfinished, poor-quality versions of them. So, they went back to the studio, finished the songs (while adding a few that hadn't been leaked), and released it as Steal This Album! in November 2002.

Though officially recognized as their third album, the general consensus is that Steal This Album! is simply a counterpart to Toxicity by most fans, considering the leak and the fact that the bulk of its songs were demoed during the Toxicity sessions. And, even if they prefer to keep them separated, I have to admit that pairing the two albums together makes for a surprisingly solid double album. Are there clunkers? Absolutely. Still, the consistency of the tracks is of benefit to the piece, and fans have been cherry picking their favourites and creating superalbums out of them for a decade and running.

Plus, the band learned a valuable lesson from the experience of these two albums, which leads to...

System Of A Down: Mezmerize/Hypnotize

Having already had their hand forced with Toxicity, System Of A Down decided to cut the leakers off at the pass when recording what was, in earnest, the follow-up to Toxicity. So, in 2005, they announced that their next album would be a double split into two parts (despite the fact that both albums' running time combined would not only fit on one disc but still be shorter than Load after doing so), with Mezmerize releasing in May and Hypnotize following six months later.

When Mezmerize hit the shelves, I was working at a record store, and I remember it as being one of the last event releases. By which I mean, people came out in droves for it, and it felt like much more than simply a new album. Listening to Mezmerize today, it's hard to imagine it as an overwhelming mainstream smash if you weren't there, but it was. To its credit, the album was top-notch; hardly a dud on it, Mezmerize plays like a speeding car on an icy road, threatening to crash and burn at any given moment but gleefully skidding along with no regard for its safety or the safety of its' listeners' ears.

But, something funny happened on the way to Hypnotize. In the short six month span between the releases, a lot of folks got offended, bored, burned out on the band or a combination of all three. Hypnotize sold well, but not as well as Mezmerize. To be sure, it was still a multi-platinum bona fide hit, but the same magic wasn't there. Hypnotize's release wasn't treated like an equally important event to Mezmerize; perhaps fans assumed it was comprised not of the second half of the album, but rather the songs that weren't good enough for the first.

Whatever the case, Hypnotize doesn't give off the same mojo that Mezmerize does; there's nothing as joyfully incendiary as B.Y.O.B., nor a song with the same irresistible combination of ugly and beauty as Question! There are fantastic songs on display, such as the powerful behemoth Holy Mountains and the deliriously odd Vicinity of Obscenity. It just doesn't have the same consistency of Mezmerize, and I can't help but feel that these two albums would have been better served as a singular epic piece of, say, 16 songs with the other seven left off the proceedings and used as B-sides.

So, no, splitting recording sessions into multiple releases is nothing new. It's simply a case of many artists choosing this method over a short period of time. But one has to ask; why, and why now?

We'll talk about that in Part 2.