Ben Rayner
Pop Music Critic
The seven-inch single is pretty much the inverse of the MP3 file.
Physical, inconsistent, mortal and definitely not portable in the post-Walkman sense of the word, the beloved, wee black discs upon which rock 'n' roll was born should by all rights have been dealt a final death blow by the arrival of digital music files.
Curiously, though, sales of 45s – a format introduced by RCA in 1951 – are on the rise. Especially in the U.K., where they've inched back up to more than 15 per cent of the total singles market and the White Stripes' "Icky Thump" last year posted the highest single-week sales of a seven-inch in 20 years.
Most of the activity in mainstream circles is overseas, mind you, where the major record labels never used the advent of the compact disc as an excuse to kill off their singles market altogether and force the record-buying public onto full-length CDs. Since the rise of Napster and, later, iTunes, however, a market for single songs has been reborn, and one of the unintended benefactors has been the seven-inch. Sub Pop Records' famous "single of the month" club has been reactivated. Toronto has its own label dealing just in seven-inches, Davy Love's Magnificent Sevens imprint. And with more seven-inches out there making the rounds, more musicians have started thinking in terms of singles again.
Toronto country troupe One Hundred Dollars, for instance, fetes the release of its "Fourteenth Floor" seven-inch for local label Blocks Recording Club tomorrow at the Silver Dollar. It's the first in a series of singles to be issued by different labels around the country.
"We had initially conceived it as a takeoff on Gordon Lightfoot's `Railroad Trilogy,' but the format was too small to do three songs," laughs vocalist Simone Schmidt. "We thought it would be more interesting to leave it open-ended and use the seven-inches to record interesting singles and B-sides – things that we wouldn't necessarily want to put on an album.
"It's all new and it's all thematically linked to where the label is. So for the label in Alberta, we're recording a song called `Black Gold' that's about Fort McMurray and the oil sands. ... It's interesting to have that kind of challenge in the concept when you're writing."
The creative possibilities offered by the 45, not its marketability, are what have sustained the format through all these years when it was supposed to be dead.
"I personally love them," says Oliver Ackermann of New York noise-rock outfit A Place to Bury Strangers, which recently issued a volley of seven-inches on Important Records. "When you create a seven-inch, it's an opportunity to do something unique that doesn't fit for an album. The tracks are also immediate; there is no filler. A single is a glimpse of a moment and an experience and an idea."
They're also highly collectible. The punk and indie-rock undergrounds have always been particularly fond of the seven-inch as a badge of fanhood, something doled out in limited quantities and often specific circumstances – on certain tour dates or on labels available only in a certain region.
Bands like No Age and Toronto's F---ed Up are almost legendary these days for the volume of material they churn out on hard-to-find seven-inches.
"Seven-inches are like little flags for the fan," says Joel Carriere of Toronto's Dine Alone Records. "It's a conversation to relate and compare."
As a result, says Carriere, "it's a lot more fun for us to work on it because we are getting rad pieces of history to fans ... Vinyls are not going to float a record company by any means, but they will put a smile on some fans' faces and in the end that's all you really want to do."
Evaporators lead singer Nardwuar the Human Serviette – such a fan of "dead" formats that you can still get Evaporators albums on eight-track cassette – finds the artwork possibilities of the 45 attractive, conceding that the actual sound of the recording is almost secondary to the package itself.
He recalls with no small fondness, for instance, an old Tumor Circus seven-inch titled "Swine Flu" that came out during the 1990s. Each copy had a hole drilled through it, rendering it impossible to play.
"They're like pet rocks," he says. "People just want to collect them."
SOURCE: http://www.thestar.com
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