The Metal Crypt - Feature: Down With Space Wasters!

Down With Space Wasters!

...Or why the hell do bands like to piss me off by wasting my time

A long overdue rant.

Alright... Got a few CDs recently (don't I always) and what do many of them have in common? Space wasters at the end of the CD! I didn't know what name to give this so I went with that. Those who visit the site and read the reviews regularly know that both Mystophales and I have a strong dislike for those. I don't want to use the term "hidden tracks" since this is not like just having an extra song that's not listed in the booklet with only a minute or two of silence before them. No, I'm talking here about things like having 70 tracks with a length of a few seconds, either silent or with bizarre noises, just to end on a track that's not even a song. I'm also talking about long 40 minutes tracks that contain, say a 6 minute song, then silence until the end - it doesn't even end with any kind of sound, or sometimes just a burp or something juvenile like that. What the hell is this crap? What's the purpose? "Hey the new XYZ album is 65 min. in length!" Yeah, right! 30 minutes of it is music and the rest is useless crap. A CD I got recently even has a track nearly 4 minutes in length that just lists Christian crimes over the course of a few centuries. WHO GIVES A FUCK!?!?!?! If you really want us to know, just list that in the booklet for fuck sake! At least this one is short, but the noises playing in the background during the narration are annoying as hell. Die! That's not nearly as bad as those bands that will put some hidden techno track at the end.. Is it one minute long? Noooo... It HAS to be over 10-15 minutes of course! Fuck off! When I buy a metal album I don't want any techno crap on it. Want actual examples? Here are a few that come immediately to mind: Necrodeath/Black As Pitch (the Christian crimes track), Usurper/Necronemesis (the vinyl track is very short, the CD one is looooong!), Myrkskog/Death Machine and ...and Oceans/A.M.G.O.D. (techno crap). The list goes on...

Ok, if you're listening to this with a discman or on your PC, it's easy to skip it. But when your CD player is in another room and you have the CD on repeat play or in rotation, it's fucking annoying!!! This kind of waste was very limited (and rare) with vinyl, but with CDs you got 74 minutes to play with - most albums do not exceed 40 minutes so there's potential for a lot of this crap, and many bands are doing it! What the hell is the purpose of this? Most of the time this kind of shit ruins an album for me (and don't expect a perfect rating in a review if you have that kind of crap on your album, bitch!!!) This is just a stupid, useless abuse of the hidden track concept that only generates boredom to extreme annoyance for the listener. I, and I suspect many others, can live without this crap.

End of rant... until the next one.