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Re: For the love of the Extended Play (EP) record

22 by Isadore Nabi
There are so many great EPs, I think of another one every time I go to hit submit.

Neil Young - Eldorado
Metallica - The $5.98 E.P. – Garage Days Re-Revisited
Ludicra - s/t
Radiohead - My Iron Lung and Airbag / How Am I Driving? (prime example of a band whose B-sides are often as good or better than their albums)
PJ Harvey - B-Sides (ditto)
Helium - Pirate Prude, Superball +, No Guitars
The Spells - The Age of Backwards E.P., Bat Vs. Bird
Cadallaca - Out West
Constantines - The Modern Sinner Nervous Man EP
Cursive - Burst and Bloom (probably no one else here loves this band, but this is one of the best things they ever did)
Vitreous Humor - The Vitreous Humor Self-Titled E.P.
Joel RL Phelps - The Downer Trio, Inland Empires, Traditions, Consulate
Silkworm - Chokes (obviously an unintended EP, and I wish it were a full-length, but some of my favorite songs are on here)
Bottomless Pit - Congress

Oh, and Sovereign for sure.

Re: For the love of the Extended Play (EP) record

26 by enframed
jason from volo wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:44 pm
the letter o wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 5:34 am So when does an EP become a mini-LP? We're in very murky waters here, people. I'd venture that going beyond 6 or 7 tracks might qualify as an LP, but I guess total runtime enters into it too. Fuck it, here's a few favorites I'd count as EPs...
I had first heard of the term "mini-LP" only recently when looking up information about Come On Pilgrim.

The definition of "mini-LP" seems especially squishy to me (does the Ramones' first album count as a "mini-LP" since it's only 29 minutes long?) and I don't use it.

There are probably more official definitions for an EP than this, but I always thought of an EP as consisting of (with a few exceptions):

- More than 2 songs, and those songs are more or less of equal caliber (i.e. not a single with two throwaway tracks)
- Length that could feasibly fit on one side of a 12" vinyl record at 33 1/3 RPM, so 20-25 minutes maximum (i.e. 1/2 of an LP)
From Wikipedia:
"In the United States, the Recording Industry Association of America, the organization that declares releases "gold" or "platinum" based on numbers of sales, defines an EP as containing three to five songs or under 30 minutes.[20] On the other hand, The Recording Academy's rules for Grammy Awards state that any release with five or more different songs and a running time of over 15 minutes is considered an album, with no mention of EPs.[21]

In the United Kingdom, any record with more than four distinct tracks or with a playing time of more than 25 minutes is classified as an album for sales-chart purposes. If priced as a single, they will not qualify for the main album chart but can appear in the separate Budget Albums chart.[2]

An intermediate format between EPs and full-length LPs is the mini-LP, which was a common album format in the 1980s. These generally contained 20–30 minutes of music and about seven tracks.[8]"[/i]

The Cure's "The Walk is six tracks *and* about 26 minutes. So I guess it could be an EP or Mini-LP, the latter of which is printed on the US release while the UK version is four tracks. Not sure what the UK release says on the cover.
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