My CD player is broken at the moment. As a result, I've found myself becoming reacquainted (forcibly) with my limited vinyl LP collection. The biggest part of my collection is on CD, but there's stuff in there I've collected on vinyl over the years.

To be sure, I can't think why I got those things on vinyl now, since most of it is stuff I could've got at the time on CD, which is the way I prefer to listen to my music. (Indeed, I've seen bought some of those things again in digital format.) I have no especial fondness for vinyl and tend to get the shits with those digital-phobic snobs who continually harp on the superiority of vinyl. Surely nostalgia is informing these people's judgements as much as any other consideration?

Now, after a couple of weeks of listening to stuff on the old black discs I haven't played for years, I'm beginning to see where the vinyl faithful are coming from. (It helps that we now have a better turntable in this house than we have done for about 20 years. Though part of a fairly cheap all-in-one-unit stereo, it gives a better sound than any of its predecessors we've bought since about 1980.) Vinyl does have a certain character of its own, and in one case at least the restrictions of the old vinyl LP quite possibly had a beneficial effect on us all.

One of the albums in my vinyl collection is Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull, and that's one of the things I've pulled out again. Thick As A Brick is one of the more (in)famous monuments of 1970s progressive rock, being a single continuous piece of music, albeit split over two sides of a record. Undeniably interesting, if not a little wearing, but it's the bridge between the two parts that's always bothered me. There's something basically clumsy about it; given the complexity of most of the music otherwise (fairly dense arrangement, multiple time signatures), this protracted series of hammered-out guitar and piano chords is jarring. Side one ends with a faint sound of wind blowing and side two opens with the same before distant echoes of the end of side one become audible, and then it just goes straight back into the music. That seems to make it stand out even more.

I posited this on another online forum I visit. Someone said in response that if they'd had CDs in 1972, Ian Anderson would've been able to write the whole thing as one piece without having to include that clumsy linking passage. Which is true, I suppose, but on reflection a more disturbing thought came to mind. Not only was Anderson constrained by having to split the music over both sides of a record, he also had to keep the length of the music to within vinyl limits. If he'd composed it for CD, just think, he might've been tempted to write it to 70-80 minutes instead of 45.

There is indeed something to be said for vinyl. God (or whoever) bless its crackly black soul.