Blame It On

When Blame It On the Youth came out a reviewer in the Phoenix New Times cried foul. I delayed buying the new disc... not because of this sort of backlash - or that I didn't expect the album to be good - but because I'm trying to cut back, thank you. This new disc was a bit of an unknown... and after the Content Protected mess I wasn't hopeful.

Then Rhapsody finally got the disc and I listened to it. It's good. It's very good. So now my wariness was turned to attempting to kick back at the backlash; and adventurousness, if you will. Plus I was happy that the plastic-wrap had a 3.5" diameter sticker on it warning you that this was a DVD. You didn't have to parse a sea of text to pick out the warnings... it fully dominated the front cover.

See, they did not release this on CD. At all. It's available on vinyl and on DVD. The DVD has 14 videos... as well as 14 .wav files... which are the same thing you'd find on a CD. If you have access to a computer with a DVD drive you can open up that folder and copy the .wav files to a computer. You can then play these files there, copy them to a compatible digital music player... or burn them to a blank CD. I burned them... then ripped mp3s for use on my Creative (it could've played the .wav files... but I didn't want to take up that much space.)

So I'm totally pleased. I have a good album and I have it on my Creative. I was able to use someone else's DVD-drive to get the files. And if I ever used a CD player I have my own copy ready to go (and it's burned from .wav files so it's far better quality than a CD burned from mp3s.)

And if I want to watch the videos they're there. It's not like they're going to be repeated endlessly on MTV. I've watched 4 or 5. They don't make me wish for a video for My Girlfriend's Best Friend... but they're interesting enough that I'll watch them all. And there are bands where I wish they'd do a video for every song.

So all this cost me, compared to a CD, is one blank CD, a bit of sharpie ink and a bit more time (which was a one time deal.) That's a reasonable price for 14 videos.

There's nothing wrong with Blame It On The Youth by the Sun.