Non-Review: Lordi's Seven New Albums

This is not going to be a review.

Lordi this week are releasing not just an album, not just a second album of a pair, but rather SEVEN new albums. This has stirred up enough bile in me I feel like I need to rant a little bit, so that's what I'm going to do.

This all started with Lordi's last album, which was a fictitious compilation that imagined what would have been if Lordi had been around for all of the last forty years. It wasn't the best of ideas, but the execution of it is where things really went off the rails. Lordi has never, in my estimation, released a full album of great material even when they were just being themselves, so attempting to be ten different bands was something well beyond the scope of their abilities.

No one wanted to hear Lordi the disco band, or Lordi the yacht-rock band, and yet we got those songs anyway. Lordi's talents do not extend to those genres, so the record was filled up with songs that were exposing all their shortcomings. It was an experiment, which I can sort of appreciate, but it was an experiment that failed, which they should have realized before putting the record out.

That brings us to today, where Lordi was so in love with that concept they decided to expand on it. Instead of getting one record with all these styles on it, Lordi instead decided to spin off each of them into their own record, which means there are now seven new albums of songs to get through all at once. And the band wanted to make it ten, if not for the label stepping in to stop them.

This brings up three issues.

1. Does anyone think one band can write seventy great songs in one album cycle?

It's possible that a flash of creativity could come up that leads to more songs than every before in someone's life. That being said, seven albums in this day and age is anywhere from fifteen to thirty years worth of a career. Having a bit of experience with this area, I simply can't see how anyone can write that many songs with them all being their best work. When you hear stories about other bands that wrote thirty songs for an album before picking the best ones for the final product, it's almost always the case that most of the songs left on the cutting room floor aren't of the same quality. Every artist only has so many good ideas in their head, and it isn't often you can burn through this many this fast. As I mentioned before, Lordi never proved they could write twelve good ones for one album, so asking for six times that many is beyond belief.

2. Does anyone have the time or attention span to listen to seven albums at once?

We're constantly inundated with new music, movies, tv shows, and everything else under the sun. If we want to, there are enough albums being released to fill all day and all night without ever listening to anything we've heard before. So that leads me to wonder how in the world anyone is supposed to have the time to dedicate to seven Lordi albums all released at the same time. I don't know if I've had a single week in years where I've listened to seven new albums. We all have a limit how much new music we can absorb, and Lordi is exceeding mine, and I would assume most other people's as well. To ask us to spend seven hours listening to their music, when one listen wouldn't be enough to properly assess all this stuff if we are Lordi fans, is requiring a massive investment of time few of us would have. Even if we did have the time, I have to imagine that many songs would all start to blend together, which defeats the entire purpose.

3. What purpose does this serve?

Flooding the market with music very few people will ever listen to doesn't seem like the best of ideas to me. While they generated a few headlines simply due to the absurdity of the proposition, the lasting impact of this experiment is going to be non-existent. If this was an attempt to try to boost streaming numbers by giving people so many new songs to check out, I can see where the idea might have come from, but I fear it will backfire. After hearing that much Lordi, people are very likely to be sick of them, and wanting them to go away for a long time. That wouldn't be what they want. The other thing option is that people will see that many songs, and decide it isn't worth bothering with any of them if they aren't going to listen to them all. That also wouldn't work out well for Lordi.

I fall into that last camp. I'm writing this piece as a gripe, but also as an explanation for why I didn't listen to a single note of these seven new records. Frankly, with how much of my time and energy it would take even to scan through them to see if there is anything worth listening to, it wasn't worth it.