Here Comes the Blackout...!Stornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

Two minutes and three seconds, the shortest thing on the album, and the one that most clearly enjoys itself.

The short one

Every album this dense needs a release valve. Here Comes the Blackout...! is it: two minutes, in and out, with an exclamation mark in the title doing exactly the work an exclamation mark should do.

It is the least earnest thing on Beachcomber’s Windowsill and one of the most replayed, for the same reason that short songs on long albums always are.

What it does

The arrangement is bright and fast by this band’s standards, with the brass well forward and the harmony used as punctuation, not as a bed. There is no long build, because there is no time for one.

Placed seventh, straight after the album’s most pointed song, it functions as a deliberate change of air before the record settles into its last stretch.

The brevity is doing structural work as well as comic work. At 2:03 it is barely half the length of anything around it — the four tracks either side run between three and a half and four and a half minutes — so the album briefly changes pace without changing direction, and the listener arrives at the closing run already moving.

A note on the title

The ellipsis and the exclamation mark are the band’s own, and they are reproduced here as they appear on the sleeve. Small typographic details of this kind are the first thing to get flattened when a tracklist is copied from one website to another, and one of the things an archive is for.

It is a small song with a long title and a shorter runtime than either. That is a compliment.

Short songs on long records

An album of eleven tracks averaging four minutes needs at least one piece that refuses to behave. Two minutes is short enough to feel like an interruption, and the interruption is what makes the surrounding material breathe.

Bands often use a fragment or an instrumental for this. Stornoway wrote a complete song and simply stopped it early, which is harder and better: nothing here is a sketch.

It has the highest replay rate of anything on the record for the ordinary reason that short songs on long albums always do — it is over before you have decided whether to skip it.

Who decided a two-minute track could stay

The album was produced by the band themselves — Brian Briggs and Jon Ouin are the credited producers — which is worth knowing when a debut keeps a track this short.

A producer brought in from outside, on a first record for a label that had just signed the band, is the person who usually argues that two minutes is not a song. Nobody was in the room to make that argument.

What survives is the album’s only real change of pace, sitting exactly where a listener starts to need one.

In the sequence

On the record it follows We Are the Battery Human and leads into Watching Birds. That puts it seventh of eleven, at 2:03.

This one was never pulled out on its own. Beachcomber's Windowsill holds the release and chart detail.