I was listening to the Jayhawks' "Rainy Day Music" and it occurred to me how lopsided it is - the second half suffers from middling tunes and "give-the -drummer-some" failures. It's a shame after such a good Side A.

Some bands can put together 5 or 6 good songs and then make a clearing house out of the last half of their records without even decent sequencing.

Other examples?

In terms of recent stuff:

Ok Go
British Sea Power
Glen Phillips
Joy Zipper

Not to say that any of them are inherently bad, but they all seemed pretty front-loaded to me.

I'd say about 60% of the records I've heard this year are front-loaded.

I don't know if record companies think we just don't have the attention span to listen to music for more than 20 minutes or if the i-pod has demolished the art of track sequencing but I think it's becoming more and more common to see, say, four or five of the best tracks on a twelve track album on the first half of an album.

You hit it right on the head konstantinl. We live in a single society. Kids today fill their ipods with one or two songs from an artist, and since that is all the really gets mass radio play the labels don't care much whether a full length is any good or not. Just so long as the single is 'bangin' or whatever terms they use these days.

I wish most albums were only 30-50 minutes long. Not because I have a short attention span, but because most artists only seem to make that many great songs every year or two.

The last 20 minutes of an album isn't there to be filled with b-sides.

Also, in terms of sequencing, it seems like some records can get a cool sequence for the first five or six but have no idea for the second half, save maybe the last song.

Your left turn signal is still blinking.

Sequencing is like an art in itself. Sometimes I listen to a fantastic album and realize at the end that if the songs were sequenced differently, the entire record could have been a mess, unless you like cutting/pasting songs to your iPod or something.

Sometimes Ill listen to a CD for the first time on 'shuffle', and it really dictates how much I like it. I did this with the new SFA, and it really affected how much I like the disc (not as much as I could)