Some albums are long, and others are short. And just like how loud we choose to play them, an album’s length is another dimension along which the music can come to satisfy us, to a greater or lesser extent.
Part of what makes James Carr’s great You Got My Mind Messed Up or Milo’s So The Flies Don’t Come is their punchy length and consistency, making them endlessly re-listenable. Part of what makes Swans’ odyssey of an album, Soundtracks for the Blind, is its extended, labyrinthian explorations. Ditto for Bitches Brew or Common As Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood.
Thus, I set myself the task this week of choosing a great short album. The shorter, the better. The album I landed on is Zentropy by Frankie Cosmos, which clocks in at a whopping 17 minutes. Its tracklist, almost miraculously, consists of 10 songs, giving each one an average length of about 1 minute and 44 seconds. This album has to be one of the greatest ever under 20 minutes and is a testament to the ground that one can apparently cover in such a short time.
Zentropy wholly embraces a cutesy, girl-band twee-pop aesthetic in both its intentionally simple instrumentation and its lyrical preoccupation with Frankie’s own inner life. This sound, in the hands of a weaker songwriter, could easily come off as cloying, self-important, and solipsistic. Yet, at no point does it feel this way. Instead, the album is full of intelligent and relatable emotional resonances. She at once portrays herself as sorrowful and wistful but at the same time does so with clever, confident playfulness that is always charming, and never too much.
She deftly switches between earnest reflections on the difficult psychic intricacies of private life to ironic self-deprecation. She does so in such a way that the latter never trivialises the cosmically trivial but personally serious nature of the former. The song Buses Splash With Rain is the perfect example of this. The concept of being “the kind of girl buses splash with rain” is an ingenious self-conscious exploitation of her own image, while still earnestly expressing a real, if rather embarrassing, feeling.
This album is full of such revelations. Fireman is a disarmingly straightforward dedication to her father, a firefighter. Birthday Song is elliptical but richly complex, in spite of it only lasting just over a minute. Sad 2 is a touching ode to her dog who passed away, one that, again, perfectly encapsulates what I describe above. She sings:
dad made the appointment
to kill my best friend
there goes my fear
of death
I just want my dog back
Is that so much to ask
I wish that
I could kiss his paws
And this is to say nothing of the music. The album is absolutely brimming with great, catchy pop songwriting. Virtually every song immediately catches your ear and bores its way inside you. You may find any one of them stuck in your head days later.
As with all short albums, Zentropy is best listened to in full and on repeat, at least 3 or 4 times in a row. After all, it puts albums 3 or 4 times its length to shame.
- Rowan
Recommended Songs: Just listen to all of them, it won’t take long
Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, YouTube
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