Matchbook Romance - Stories & Alibis

Alright boys and girls, time for a little rant. Tonight’s subject is (drum roll please) the infamous hidden track. First, a little history for you all. During the recording of Abbey Road the song “Her Majesty” was originally in between “Sun King” and “Polythene Pam” but Paul McCartney didn’t like it there and requested it be removed. The engineer took it out and simply stuck it on the very end of the tape, so as not to waste it or throw it away. In the meantime, a demo was made from that tape with “Her Majesty” unknowingly attached to the end of the album. The Beatles kind of thought “sure, why not?” and decided to leave the track attached. Thus, “Her Majesty” became the first hidden track in album history. Fast forward to current day and my how times have changed. The hidden track has turned from a nice surprise to thing of hatred for me. Why? It’s simple really. It has no point. Why bands put it on their album I do not know. To hide it from the label? Yeah right, like they don’t know it’s there. To make an artistic statement, or make the album unique? Not likely. To give their fans a nice surprise? Maybe, but at least do it with some taste. If you simply MUST add a hidden track to your album then that is all fine and good, but do it the right way. If the album has ten “real” tracks then simply put an eleventh track with the “hidden” song. DO NOT put in over five minutes of needless and annoying silence on track ten so that the hidden song begins at 11:34 on track ten. This is annoying! It just makes me hold down fast forward. An example of a particularly annoying situation in which this might happen: I might have a disc in the changer while friends are over to party or play dominoes, etc. The last track is selected randomly and then five minutes of silence occur in which everyone in the place is thinking, “Who turned off the stereo?” You can either sit and endure it, or find your way to the stereo and track forward. Either, of course, is an annoyance. Also, DO NOT follow the steps of Matchbook Romance. Stories & Alibis is a very listenable album. It isn’t great, but it is quite catchy when in the right mood and in the right places. Twelve tracks compose the album, and if it were that simple, this review might have been a little better or higher. But oh no, they decided to put in seventy one tracks of silence. That is right, SEVENTY ONE tracks! All of tracks 13-83 are an astounding 4.4 seconds long and each is pure silence. After that you think you would be rewarded right? Again, no. Track 84 is a three minute long craptacular track of noise. No melody, no lyrics, no instruments, no nothing; just some mindless spoken word type rambling and crappy noise that makes you want to kick in a speaker. My disgust of the album never seems to reach high enough a pinnacle when I am reminded of this fact. Why God? Why Matchbook Romance? WHY?!?!? [Five minutes later after cooling down…] In all fairness the album is catchy and decent. Particularly, the drumming is superb and blows through the speakers. Songs like “Playing For Keeps”, “Promises” and “Tiger Lily” make the album worth more than one listen, and as far as generic pop MTV teenage angst rock it is a stellar album. But seriously people, I can’t give it more than strictly an average score for such a heinous violation of the rules of good album making. Sorry folks. [www.matchbookromance.com]