We Wait, We Anticipate But Where's The Release Date? The Records We Longed Forever For

posted in: Music News • Rock

If you don’t know anything about PJ Harvey, know this: The lady has bigger balls than you do. She’s the type to never be afraid to do exactly what she wants and as an artist she’s defined by her creative adventurousness. Her career has spanned nearly two decades, she’s never been accused of repeating herself and her records are generally met with both critical praise and applause from her sizable cult fanbase.

That said, the lady has a lot of clout and fan goodwill: currency she can spend as part of her artistic license. Still that doesn’t prevent a statement like the one she recently made in an interview with The Guardian UK from being deflating.

“Ten years,” she says. Ten years until what? “If it takes ten years [to record a followup to Let England Shake] then I would rather wait and know that I felt each piece was strong than feel that it was time to put something out but five pieces are a bit weak.” Let England Shake only came out this past February and it’s admirable that Harvey is making considerations as to her next record, to stick a date that far in the future has to be a bummer for her hardcore acolytes. That said, many will wait for as long as Polly Jean wants. If she doesn’t want to crank out a record, it’s her perogative.

She’s a perfectionist, evidenced in that same interview by the claim that Let England Shake was the end result of “hundreds of completed songs” and poems being paired down into a cohesive twelve track LP. Her comments made us think of some of the other records that artists have made their fans wait for and whether it was all really worth it.

If you’re a Billy Corgan fan these days, then congratulations, you are officially part of the most forgiving fan base on the planet. While “The Smashing Pumpkins” made a “comeback” in 2007 with Zeitgeist, most would agree that the record just didn’t hit as hard as Siamese Dream or Millen Collie and the Infinite Sadness despite the seven year gap between Zeitgeist and 2000’s Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music. That said, Corgan has already determined that his next project is going to be another labor of love.

The concept behind their new record Teargarden by Kaleidyscope can be a bit to wrap your head around, but here it goes: The album will be forty-four tracks, released one at a time online over the course of seven years. But that’s not all as Corgan just announced the scheduled release of Oceania, a ten track “album within an album” (so meta) as part of the Teargarden project. But hey, if they’re rolling out reissues of nearly all the Pumpkins classic output from the ’90s, then we should not look the gift horse in the mouth. We’ll let you slide on this one, Corgan.

Rappers aren’t absent in the discussion of delayed releases. Dr. Dre has been working on Detox since 2003 and a date has been set for its releases in nearly every following year. It’s tough to speculate on the motivation behind the push back but Dre has certainly capitalized on his fanbase’s want for new material. Every few months there would be snippets of songs and media bites to salivate beat hungry fans, keeping people satiated while whetting their appetites for new material. Ooooh, Dr. Pepper commercial with Dre songs! Aaaahhhh, Beats Headphones! Maybe because Dre stayed active in the meantime with other projects (producing Eminem and others, duh) allowed him to stay in the good graces of the fans and the press. So now, in 2011, when singles are trickling out with accompanying videos (!), we have to believe that the album is really coming out this year, right? Well, there’s no set release date but he’s making speakers for Chrysler now. So yeah, that’s something.

Finally, we can’t talk about overdue records without mentioning the obvious elephant in the room. Listen up, Axl Rose.

Chinese Democracy, /CHīˈnÄ“z diˈmí¤krÉ™sÄ“/, noun, Dimished expectations as the result of postponement or delay.

If someone called you the Chinese Democracy of anything, it’s going to be a diss. What other album can you think of that has a wikipedia page dedicated to its own gestation period? You all know the story; a decade and a half in the making with an expense of over $10 million to create. And you know what the most damming part about the whole affair is? The album was something of a non-entity. It wasn’t the spectacular success that Axl and nobody else believed it could be, critically or commercially speaking. It wasn’t a train wreck either. Reviews were middling but not unforgiving and the record has gone double platinum worldwide. The fact that it could not be a spectacle, an event to be witnessed, in any form is probably the gravest disappointment. Rock and roll is about giving people a show. If you’re going to put that much time and effort into your product, especially if you’re any of the big names mentioned before then you’d better make it worth the wait for your fans. Make sure you give them something to talk about.