Call the bank manager: it’s new release Friday!

I wouldn’t be the first and probably not the last to say the music industry is totally out of touch, but that this particular Friday falls shortly before most people’s monthly payday, means that many bank accounts are currently running on fumes. Which calls into question the scheduling of a whole slew today of blockbuster albums. I’ve counted at least ten, including the likes of Adele’s unimaginatively-titled 30 (for which vinyl pressing resources have reportedly been consumed, allegedly causing production problems for everyone else). 

I’ll spare you any further consideration of the Adele album - you’ll be hearing enough of it until she releases 35 or 40, or whatever will be her next maudlin confessional - and instead cock a learned ear to the new offerings from Elbow, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and Sting, simply because they’re the three of today’s release tsunami that actually interest me.

Elbow - Flying Dream 1

As regulars to this blog will hopefully recall, barely two months ago Elbow dished up an evening of sublime comfort food listening with what was, for many of us at the Hammersmith Apollo, the first gig in almost two years thanks to the pandemic. It was, in any case, the perfect return to gigging, delivered by one of the UK’s finest live acts, anchored by their avuncular lead singer and a set of trademark “soaring” singalong anthems that have brightened many an outdoor summer festival. The set included a cameo from this new album in the delightful What I Am Without You. It gave a glimpse of the somewhat album’s somewhat warmer direction than 2019’s Giants Of All Sizes  (and a song vaguely reminiscent of Clive Dunn’s Grandad…) Dream 1 completes this evolution with what can only be described as an absolutely gorgeous album, a cosy, comforting duvet in a winter’s morning that comprehensively taps into Elbow’s undoubted craft for tenderness, both musically and, inevitably, in Guy Garvey as principle lyricist.

Garvey is a core part of Elbow’s “value proposition”, to use an excruciatingly wanky marketing phrase. His immensely likeable persona pours forth from his words and those mellifluous Bury tones that adorn his delivery on radio and TV outings. But it would be wholly wrong to depict Elbow - and Garvey’s presence - as a schmaltz act. They’ve just come up with a formula that allows for melodicism, romantic escape and, yes, even a prog rock sensibility. Flying Dream 1 has the not original precept of being a lockdown album (as, it would appear, are most examples of the current slew), but comes from a performance premise, having been recorded live at Brighton’s Theatre Royal while it was shut to audiences during the pandemic. Of course, all recordings are “live”, but here is an old-fashioned approach, harking back to the days before endless overdubs and, latterly, the digital recording of entire albums on iPhones. Bruce Springsteen’s recent Letter To You was thusly done, and it gives an immediacy without any excess ambience due to the venue. Perhaps, though, it’s what makes Flying Dream 1 sound tight and efficient, genuine even, painting beautiful landscapes about love (The Only Road), hope (After The Eclipse), childhood (Calm And Happy) and the tenderness of the title track. Inveterate romantics might be, as I write, beating a path to their local record emporium/streaming site to wallow in Adele’s latest collection of mawkishness, but as I become ever more reflective myself and, just a little soppy as I prepare for marriage, I know which album I’d rather be immersing myself in. And Flying Dream 1 is its name.

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise The Roof

Like Peter Gabriel, it’s still impossible - annoyingly, perhaps - to separate Robert Plant from the band he fronted many years ago, despite both putting considerable distance between the outfits they once fronted more than 40 years ago. It shouldn’t be necessary, in both cases, considering the bodies of work they’ve generated in the decades since. In Gabriel’s case, singer and group parted company, albeit amicably, and in Plant’s, the entire enterprise ground to an abrupt halt in the wake of its drummer’s misadventure-fuelled death in 1980. But with an uptick in Led Zeppelin activity, as their seminal fourth album recently reached its 50th anniversary, with the obligatory box set reminding everyone of rock’s most archetypal viking marauders, it’s hard not to be drawn on Plant’s legacy as the honey-tressed stage god. 

If, though, I could be afforded further licence to compare Gabriel and Plant, their post-band careers have followed similar paths, with both finding their groove in music drawn from a more eclectic palette of cultures than the pop, blues, soul and rock that fuelled their youthful ambition. Plant, in particular, has tapped authentically, post-Zepp, into Americana, reaching a particularly credible, Grammy-hoovering high in 2007 with Raising Sand, his first collaboration with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. Working with roots authenticity’s go-to producer T Bone Burnett, Raising Sand shifted in impressive quantities, demonstrating an audience acceptance of a music form that Plant has approached passionately and with credibility as a solo artist, digging deep into a version of the blues that his Earth-conquering old vehicle at their core. The formula is reapplied by Plant and Krauss on their follow-up, 14 years later. With Burnett once again overseeing things, Raise The Roof continues where its predecessor left off with a delightful stroll through covers of bluegrass, rockabilly and folk, each balanced by Plant’s gentler singing side (no screaming "Valhalla!" here) and the more arguably more authentic rural voice of his junior partner, raised in small-town Illinois. 

Aided by a cast of faithfull sessioneers, Plant and Kraus work through a terrific hour’s worth of rug-cutters, including a lively reworking of Lucinda Williams’ Can’t Let Go (on which Williams appears herself), and a somewhat darker interpretation of the Everly Brothers’ The Price Of Love. Americana has found its way into British folk in many forms over the years, and here the duo take on the late Scottish folkie Bert Jansch’s Don’t Bother Me, with Krauss rather than Plant taking point (he reciprocates on Go Your Way by Anne Briggs, one of the legion of British folk stars to emerge in the late ’60s and early ’70s (along with John Martyn and Sandy Denny) who became huge influences on early Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page in particular. Speaking of which, a pleasantly courageous cover of Jimmy Reed’s High And Lonesome by Plant and Krauss has an almost prog rock feel, due to its use of a mellotron to add a string canvass very different from the original’s boogie. There’s always, in my mind at least, a thin line between the various American roots music forms, be it blues or bluegrass, country or western (“We got both kinds!” to quote Bob of Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers), but what you get with Raise The Roof is a loving nod to these genres without ever falling into parody of cultural appropriation. As we come closer to this year’s end, it’s already a very strong candidate for inclusion in the end-of-annum lists.

Sting - The Bridge

Lastly, we come to an artist with whom I go back a long way. Not in any personal capacity, you understand, but the second album that I ever bought with my own money was Reggatta de Blanc by The Police. Come to think of it, Sting falls into the same category as Gabriel and Plant, having once been the focal point of a recording unit for only a handful of years, before going solo, in Sting’s case with the release of The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985. I slavishly bought its follow-ups before the law of diminishing returns started to kick in. Like many a mainstream artist in the upper quartile of superstardom, Sting basically became boring, to me at least. I was never fussed by all that tabloid tattle about tantric activities, or the perma-smugness of a wealthy man with his own Tuscan vineyard and one of the most envious lifestyles in pop. It was just that his music stopped doing anything for me, which is not the case with those other two frontmen who went on to do equally interesting things with the longer branches of their careers.

Which is why The Bridge is a bit of a punt. Will it reconnect me with Sting’s songcraft? Will it provide me with something new and engaging? Actually, it does, with a breadth of styles encompassing pop and rock, the jazz his solo career has frequently embraced and even folk and electronica. Songs like the opener, Rushing Water, even hark back to The Police in their pomp, while the genuinely tender lyrics of the lively (if slightly MOR) If It’s Love and For Her Love (vaguely reminiscent of his Shape Of Your Heart from 1993’s Ten Summoner's Tales) draw on a reflective, romantic side that Sting has always been able to call on with heart, when not busy trying to demonstrate the contents of his bookshelf with pretentious references to Jungian philosophy and Shakespearian sonnets. The Book Of Numbers shows that Sting can still rock out, while the electronic beats of Loving You - arguably the album’s highlight - evokes a contemporary feel, with a distinctly dark soulfulness. He has, in the past, looked slightly twattish for his collaborations with hip-hop artists and the appropriation that entails, but here, Loving You gets the balance between modernity and intrigue absolutely right.

Amazingly, The Bridge is Sting’s 14th solo album, and while it lacks some of the edge of his earlier career, it’s entirely enjoyable, even if it falls, musically, into a category of records that will inevitably find their way into the Christmas stockings of grannies, bought for them at the Asda checkout. Yes, that puts The Bridge in a similar cadre as the likes of Coldplay and Ed Sheeran (and obviously Adele) but without wishing to sound ageist, you can’t help but feeling that Sting has earned the right to be so preeminent. As much as Sheehan, in particular, gets regularly feted, Sting has just fired off a warning reminder that he is still an absolute master of this stuff. As David Crosby demonstrated earlier this year with his masterful For Free, not all pop chops fade with age. Sting, who turned 70 in October, has shown, too, that age is not only just a number, but if you apply yourself, continuing to write and record new music long after the teenage posters have been torn down doesn’t have to be an exercise in mediocrity. Sting, consider me back! 

                                                                                                                                               

It's the vinyl countdown - Record Store Day is with us again

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

To some of us, buying records - and I mean the round, mainly black objects with a hole in the middle - is more than the fetish those who remain indifferent to physical music ownership might think it is. Each to their own. For everyone who maintains that Spain can't be beaten for a holiday (remember them?) another will insist on Greece. For Nike see Adidas. You get my point.

Music's digitisation, first with the CD and, latterly, streaming services, has undoubtedly set free consumption, and facilitated it into our busy, mobile, portable lives. However, it also abandoned the pleasures of opening a brand new record, removing it from the sleeve while still studying the artwork and liner notes, and then sitting down to listen. Well, at least, that's my justification. It's also why I'm one of those happy to be ensnared by Record Store Day, the normally annual vinyl-buying splurge designed to help out independent music dealers as they compete with the few remaining record chains, the Amazons of this world, the supermarket checkout impulse-buy points-of-sale, and streaming.

COVID-19 has forced RSD to this year postpone the regular April fixture into three smaller 'drops' - the first in August, a second today and the third next month. August's drop met with no shortage of custom, with record shops reporting brisk in-store business and the now-familiar queues forming at sunrise by punters keen to bag special releases and the odd rarity. It is, at the end of the day, a purely indulgent, self-serving frenzy, but the punters get something unique and the shops do a decent bit of business. Those that get it right, of course.

One emporium local to me, which didn't open physically on the day (unlike plenty who did), decided to do its RSD trading entirely online, with a clunky system by which you registered interest in a release in advance and then waited on the day for an e-mail at 6pm to say you could then go online and buy it. When this didn't work at the time when everything was supposed to be up and running everyone went to the shop's website and promptly crashed it, rendering Record Store Day a frustrating Saturday evening hitting 'refresh' a lot. For  RSD read RSI. Now, I appreciate that the shop in question may have stayed shut out of consideration for its staff, but it's the kind of experience that doesn't do well for customer loyalty. And makes me wish I'd been queuing up at the crack of dawn to spend my money somewhere that managed to get it right.

Perseverance, however, paid off in the end. Stupid or not, we got what we wanted from retailers who had got their e-commerce acts together: releases as disparate as The The's latest RSD-only single (a regular occurrence, but you wish Matt Johnson would do a new album, rather than these one-offs...) and a compilation of Memphis soul obscurities, the obligatory release from The Dame (BowieNowChanges) and a vinyl reissue of Peter Bruntnell's sublime Normal For Bridgwater. Happy days. Today's drop will be a little more modest (just 89 releases as opposed to August’s 345), but that may not be the point: whether you’re interested in a Two-Tone 40th anniversary compilation, Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, The Yardbirds classic Roger The Engineer or even Britney Spears’ Oops! …I Did It Again, it's sometimes worth taking a punt on RSD, buying something you've either never heard before, or haven't owned since you had it as a crudely taped copy back in the day. That’s half the fun of record curation in middle age.

“The real thing, the real joy, is in the tactile relationship, between you and the artist,” says Simon Tyler, who runs the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham, Kent. He points to the physical object itself: “This square piece of cardboard with a 12-inch round record slipped inside," he says, “It's a magical object.” Not surprisingly, Simon says that the magic begins with the record shop itself, a point I wholeheartedly agree with. The imposition of lockdown on in-store retailing severely curtailed the pleasure of browsing and discovering something you didn't even know you wanted. Or in the case of shops like Simon’s, a natter with a friendly and knowledgeable proprietor. 

“Firstly,” he says, “you hear the shop as you walk along the street. The strain of music drifting out of the double doors turns your head. ‘What’s that? Is it? Oh God, yes! I haven’t heard THAT for years!’.” Once inside, the tactile experience draws you in further. “You see row upon row of albums calling to you like a siren,” Simon says, describing his own shop’s experience, in a calming corner of Kent's oldest and quaintest market town. “You walk across the threshold and let your fingers browse across the top of the records. You see familiar pictures and faces, and new images that offer a strange fascination. They tease you; they reveal and yet conceal the secrets within.”

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Simon’s view is obviously biased, owing to running a generously stocked shop full of vinyl records, but he’s spot on. Some people can enter a fashion boutique and feel tempted to buy the place up; record shops, for me, hold the same appeal, such is my interest in buying something new or something worth hearing anew.

There is, as Simon says, a magical experience to opening up a freshly-bought record, but to me it is more about the listening experience. That, I recognise, sounds like I've swallowed the music industry's Kool-Aid and gone back for seconds. Records are, though, magical objects, which may go to explain figures from the BPI, the UK's recording industry body, earlier this year which revealed that many people who buy LPs never actually get round to playing them (and not just those like me who acquire too many and then struggle to find time to listening to them). 

Moreover, the BPI found that as many as a fifth doesn't even have anything to play their vinyl on. This reflects strangely in light of vinyl enjoying sales growth for 12 consecutive years in the UK, now accounting for one in every eight albums bought as a physical format. 

Over 4.3 million vinyl LPs were sold in the UK last year, a 4% increase on 2018. In the United States, vinyl sales have just surpassed sales of CDs for the first time since the 1980s, accounting for $232 million of music sales in the first six months of this year, as opposed to just under $130 million for CDs, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. That, the RIAA has revealed, is a 4% increase for LPs and a 48% decrease for the shiny silver discs. This might also reflect the times we’re in, but despite my love of vinyl I’ve still continued to buy CDs that I might want to play in the car. However, seeing as lockdown and all of that has meant I’ve hardly used my car since March, my listening has been largely done at home over the last six months. 

However, while all this love for vinyl is admirable, it can’t be ignored that physical sales continue to drop, and the pandemic isn’t helping. Industry figures have shown that overall physical music sales continue to drop exponentially as streaming has grown, both for ‘free’, ad-supported services as well as premium subscriptions. That, at the end of the day, is not good news for the artists themselves, who get a lesser cut of the action than they do with physical sales. For the so-called ‘heritage acts’, like Fleetwood Mac, who’ve re-released back catalogue material on vinyl to relatively healthy receipts, physical sales might offset lower income from streaming. For those in middling industry positions, now also denied the opportunity to play live - which, these days, is what makes them money, the virus has hit them hard.

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Record Store Day, at least, will provide a momentary fillip for the artists who take part - even if their releases aren’t even taken out of the shrink wrap, a phenomenon identified by the BPI in its All About The Music yearbook. “A proportion of people are buying vinyl because they’re a superfan,” said Rob Crutchley, the book’s author, when it came out in April. “Even if they don’t actually have a turntable they’re still keen to support the artist and have the artefact itself."

"There is still a strong core of fans who also value the opportunity to acquire, own or gift recorded music on physical format,” Cruchley added, pointing to the custom of artists using Record Store Day to give fans something unique. “Sometimes it can be because they’re catalogue titles that are being re-pressed in a new edition - maybe a run on a different coloured vinyl - other times it might be a new title that has a limited press on a certain format.” 

This, then, points to the irrationality of consumerism overall. I’ll be the first to ’fess up - mainly to my partner - at buying albums that already exist in my collection. In some cases, it’s for new sonic experiences - remastered, refreshed editions on 180g vinyl that have improved upon recordings made many years ago and now benefit from modern studio and reproduction techniques. Or they’re albums bought on CD early in the day, often when the new digital discs were effectively crude transfers from analogue recordings. In some cases, they’re albums I’ve only ever heard on cassette tape, furtively 'borrowed' from my brother and recorded while my dad was out at work. 

“The joy of records is in the experience,” says Simon Tyler. “That joy is deeply personal, and long may it continue.”  Record buying is, then, one of the cycles of life. There is little real justification for buying an album again “because it sounds better”, but the same applies to replacing that VHS copy of The Godfather, with the DVD, then the Blu-ray Disc and ultimately the 4K Blu-ray version to play on your super-duper new flatscreen TV. And I know you wouldn’t buy a new copy of a classic book because it’s been given a new cover, but there’s a difference. There really is.

Put the needle on the record...

(Picture: Naomi Davison)

In a week that began with the ever-youthful Gary Crowley talking about his 40 years listening to, playing and talking about music, one which continued with the premiere of a documentary about singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe's idiosyncratic approach to making music tangible, Saturday arrives with a celebration of the album itself. For today is the second annual National Album Day, a combined UK initiative of the BPI, the Entertainment Retailers Association and the Association of Independent Music, designed to embrace all that is good, still, about the album as a complete body of musical work.

It comes at a time of continuing mixed emotions about how we consume our music. Just last week I reviewed Sheryl Crow’s album Threads which, she says, is likely to be her last due to the changing consumption model of consumers effectively sequencing their own listening via the pic’n’mix of streaming services. And, yet, at the same time, the 50th anniversary re-release of The Beatles’ Abbey Road went straight into the album chart at No.1 when it was released two weeks ago, something of a reaffirmation of the album format from the very band which, according to music journalist David Hepworth, invented the LP with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 52 years ago.

According to National Album Day's organisers, the album as a packaged piece of music remains a robust proposition. 143 million albums, they say, were either streamed, downloaded or purchased in the UK in 2018, a 6% increase on 2017 and worth approximately £1.3 billion. A healthy state of affairs, it must be said, and made shinier by the 4.2 million vinyl LPs sold last year, although this must be still seen as just under 3% of the overall number of albums shifted, even if representing a 25-year high for the format.

Where all these sales are coming from is, actually, hard to identify: friends of mine who used to be dyed-in-the-wool record buyers are now just as likely to be listening to new albums via Spotify, unfussed by either the lack of tactile interaction or the reduced fidelity created by streaming compression. And, yet, the notion that young consumers are eschewing albums-whole for the selectivity of YouTube on mobile-friendly platforms could equally be a misnomer, if the experience of accompanying my 14-year-old step-daughter into Kingston’s Banquet Records recently was anything to go by. What may, though, be preventing today’s teenagers from replicating how I began my record collection at the same age may simply be economics. Paying more than £20 for a vinyl record is certainly beyond most pocket money budgets if serious collation is going to take place.

Visiting the HMV at Bluewater yesterday it was notable how much vinyl had crept back into a shop space that would, as recently as a couple of years ago been occupied by CDs. However, here lies the peculiarity of HMV’s continued survival strategy: the Bluewater shop's most prominent racks contained a strange mixture of new and old - Elbow’s brand new album Giants Of All Sizes sat next to ‘staff picks’ like Steely Dan’s Aja. Nothing wrong with either of those records (and stay tuned for my own review of the Elbow release), but there was an incongruity in what was prominent and what wasn’t. Elsewhere yesterday HMV - the chain that less than a year ago called in administrators for the second time in a decade, resulting in dozens of branch closures - opened its biggest ever retail space, ‘The Vault’ in Birmingham. Covering 25,000 square feet, it promises to be a “nirvana for music and film fans”, with dedicated spaces for vinyl, CDs, Blu-ray Discs and DVDs, as well as a stage for in-store performances. It is a brave move by the chain: even when musicians themselves are seeing their own incomes challenged by the relatively meagre returns from online music services (most make more money these days from touring than they do from releasing records), music retailing via so-called ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets is under threat from the twin terrors of high rents and the likes of Amazon.

In this mix lies the emotional act of buying a record. If you can buy an album for £1 less on Amazon and without the hassle of going out to buy it or the add-on costs of bus fares or car parking, plus that latte in Costa you weren’t planning but had anyway, record shops are heading for an even darker future. That places like Kingston’s Banquet and my favourite, Casbah Records in Greenwich, still appear to be thriving - if challenged by prevailing ‘market conditions’ - is a welcome throwback. HMV’s owner Doug Putnam still believes the need for a physical, tangible music consumption experience is driving their belief in opening a store like The Vault. “We know that people want to stream music when they're out, but also want to physically go in store and purchase something special, something they love, to add it to their collection at home,” he told the BBC.

"We all want human interaction but do we want to pay for it?", countered retail analyst Richard Hyman. "I think [The Vault] is a very courageous venture but it'll need more than courage to make the economics stack up." There is a view that I share that record shops are being kept open by two factors: firstly, old heads like me, clinging on to physical music ownership much as their hairlines recede and their waistlines expand, and secondly, younger consumers being drawn to the niche experience of buying ‘a vinyl’. Certainly a visit, the other Saturday, to Soho’s Sister Ray Records supported the first of these views, judging by the exclusively male, middle-aged clientele.

Their interest, I’m sure, is much like mine - the discovery of albums as complete experiences. It’s why this year’s National Album Day - which is being championed by Elbow themselves, Lewis Capaldi and Mark Ronson - is focusing on the theme of ‘Don’t Skip’, to encourage the discovery and enjoyment of albums as total bodies of work, to be consumed from first to last track as a single, arcing narrative. It’s the consumption experience that David Hepworth drew from with his brilliant tome A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives, which traces the evolution of the LP through his own experience, his eyes being opened by 1967’s Sgt. Pepper, before seeing it disappear with the advent of the CD and its remote-controlled skipability. ‘Long playing records’ had existed way before The Beatles’ opus but, argued Hepworth, Pepper turned the LP into something other than a vestibule for songs, a package of listening and looking. It was probably the first concept album, launching a series of ‘themed’ records from ever more progressive artists, including The Beatles themselves, but also The Who with Pete Townshend’s rock operas, Tommy and Quadrophenia, Bowie and his recurring astronautical subplots, and of course the prog giants like King Crimson and Pink Floyd, each presenting music as theatrical suites.

Hepworth’s book got to the nub of the album buying experience. It may be considered a cliche to think of nerdish types in record shops pouring over the everlasting trope of gatefold sleeves and Storm Thorgerson cover art, but it was (and still is) part of the total act of ownership, right up to and including the moment the needle was placed on the intro groove, to flipping over to Side 2 and then watching the stylus go back and forth on the outro groove. Hepworth’s description of shared house ownership and the obsession of male housemates with speaker cables and hi-fi separates is certainly one I can appreciate. I’m still a hi-fi separates man to this day. Hepworth, however, saw the beginning of the end for this experience when he first encountered a Sony Walkman when interviewing Stewart Copeland in 1980. If he wasn’t all that enamoured by Sony’s miniaturised music experience, with its tinny headphones, the next few years, with CDs and the arrival of MTV, sounded the death knell for Hepworth for the album as that total, beginning-middle-end experience. Selective consumption had now arrived. Skip-play technology had done for the album. “You can fill your room with the very best loudspeakers,” Hepworth concluded in his book. “You can spend your money on a pristine new copy of your favourite album. It can be produced on the highest quality vinyl. It can feel reassuringly weighty in your hand,” he says of today’s ‘new’ vinyl experience. The really difficult bit, he says whimsically, “will be convincing yourself that for the next 40 minutes you have nothing better to do than listen to that record. Because that’s how it was back in the golden age of the LP. It seemed as though we had all the time in the world.”

Perhaps we have lost patience. Perhaps the instant reassurance some have from looking at their phones every ten seconds is a sign that we have become digitally restless. Strange, then, that the Netflix and Amazon model is largely catered towards those who can binge through hours of box sets in a single sitting. Why we can’t do that with albums, I can’t say, although I could very easily, given the opportunity. As I write this I’m currently on the second consecutive and complete listen to Elbow’s Giants Of All Sizes. Perhaps it’s a rare luxury to be able to do so on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s how I’ve always preferred to hear albums, even delaying getting out of the car to finish up the final track of a CD. From first to final, before repeating and listening all over again, that’s the correct way to do it.

“Some artists see the album as a collection of short stories,” Elbow themselves say in the official National Album Day press release. “We see the album as a novel. Songs are often included or omitted on account of the balance of the overall record rather than on their individual merits.” The band themselves see the television binge model as a parallel: “To suggest the album is under threat because of [streamed] playlists is to suggest that movies will disappear on account of television, they are two completely different things.” Geoff Taylor, the BPI chief executive, backs this view: “The album is where an artist gives the fullest expression to their creative vision at a given moment in time. It’s a musical novel, where multiple themes can intertwine to deliver a cultural experience deeper than a single song, the summit of a performer’s art.” Album ownership, like dogs being for more than Christmas, shouldn’t be about a single 24 hours, be it National Album Day, Record Store Day, or any other such industrial cause. But with some viewing this medium as continuing to hang by a thread, a little indulgence can’t do any harm.