Not that my mood was all that far down to start with, you understand, even if it does not look like I will get to spend Saturday evening flirting shamelessly with
I really need to look into getting a new CD player one of these decades. The existing one, now a venerable 12 years old or so, is just not happy with the concept of playing CDs written on my laptop's external CD writer, and also the drawer has never quite been the same since we moved; it requires some manual intervention to persuade it to open all the way and return one's treasured discs. On the other hand, the alternative CD-playing technology is to do so through the DVD burner, which gives full Dolby Surround Sound on the CDs... a little odd, to say the least. Very heavy on the bass, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing (especially not when Placebo's The Bitter End is involved, as it is at the moment).
I've been pondering some of the stuff in my MP3 collection at the moment, and I've come to a conclusion... long outros (as opposed to intros) really irritate me. Some artists seem to have no conception of when a song should end. The obvious example is of course the Beatles' Hey Jude; I mean, who really gives a toss about three or four minutes' bimbling on "Na na na na na na na, na na na na, hey Jude". Likewise, the Divine Comedy's otherwise lovely song National Express. Three minutes or so of great stuff and then at least a minute and a half mumbling "National Express, National Express" for no readily ascertainable reason. Another lengthy song where the outro almost works is The The's Uncertain Smile, though the 80s electronica (and this'll undoubtedly be where someone pops up and tells me it was in the 90s instead; if it wasn't in the 80s, it damn well ought to have been) of the song itself contrasts a little oddly with the 70s-Bowie-esque piano twiddling that concludes that track.