Sticking with the album

Andy Miller reviews The Long-Player Goodbye: the Album from Vinyl to iPod and Back Again by Travis Elborough Do you remember the LP? Travis Elborough really, really does. The Long-Player Goodbye aims to be a comprehensive survey/love letter to the album in all its shapes and sizes. "This book comes to praise, rather than bury, the album," notes Elborough in his Introduction, pitching it as "an unashamedly rhapsodic, if highly partial tour of the LP's life and times." We all know that, thanks to the iPod and the internet, the album is kaput and the one-off track is king. For the author, like many people, the album's most perfect form was its vinyl incarnation: two sides of 12-inch plastic that snapped, crackled and popped like nothing before or since (except a bowl of Rice Krispies, of course). But reports of the death of the... [read full story]