4 The Michigan Daily - Weekend etc. - Thursday, March 2, 1995 Soundgarden: Black hol By Ted Watts _ Daily Weekend Editor Look at the singles racks in a large enough music store and you will see a large amount of imported singles. Hailing from Germany, England, Australia and other nations, these discs often contain new songs not other- wise available domestically. This is good. These singles also often cost as much as an entire domestic album. This is bad. Most people who are big enough fans of a given band will buy a single that has a unique song on it. But the price tag, which often reads up to $14, can cause serious consternation for the serious fan. What's more, there are sometimes multiple foreign issu- ances for a given single. There is only one song that each of these herds of singles is focused on, but the periph- eral and often unique songs can differ widely. Take, for example, the recent Soundgarden single "Fell On Black Days." There were recently four issu- ances of this single in Europe. The first two are German and designed to ultimately reside in the same double package, although they are sold sepa- rately. The first of these is the LP version of "Fell On Black Days" as well as a demo version of the song, a track called "Motorcycle Loop" and a cover of the Devo song "Girl U Want." The demo is an extremely different version of "Fell On Black Days" that is essentially unrecognizable as aprecur- sor to the final version. "Motorcycle Loop" is basically the sound of a mo- torcycle speeding up and being mixed around with a word or two thrown into the background, nearly inaudibly. "Girl U Want" has already been released on several otherSoundgarden singles. This should be a good thing for Soundgardeners. But then there are the other singles. The second German single also leads off with the LP version of "Fell On Black Days." It also has a song called "Kyle Petty, Son of Richard" which hasn't been seen before, the song "Birth Ritual" found domesti- cally on the "Singles" soundtrack and a live version of "Fell On Black Days." At this point, the collector must be wondering why "Kyle Petty, Son of Richard" wasn't just tacked onto the end of the first single. Another thought that might occur to this collector might be "Why do both CDs in this two-CD set start with the same version of the same song?" It would make sense to start the CD with the live version of "Fell On Black Days" and include another non-album track. But maybe there wasn't another track laying around. The first English single shatters that notion, though. In addition to (you guessed it) the LP version of "Fell On Black Days," the CD has "Kyle Petty, Son of Richard" and the video version of "Fell On Black Days." Despite being a horribly flat and discordant mutilation of the song, the video version would have made the second German single a much more attractive bit of plastic as it would have nearly justified the exist- ence of two discs for the single. But instead, a unique (if unattractive soni- cally) track was put on this third disc. The fourth disc, thankfully, contains nothing not found on the two German versions (but not containing every- thing otherwise unique on the Ger- man singles). It does, of course, con- tain the LP version of "Fell On Black Days." There are also some art differences in the singles. The basic image on all I e money pit. the discs is of a wall of trees with a cloud hovering over them, the moon glowing through the cloud. The differ- ences on the individual versions con- sist of color variations on the image and different placement of the text. One version adds the words "Contains exclusive bonus tracks" to "Soundgarden" and "Fell On Black Days." Ironically, this is the second * English version, the one whose pur- chase is completely unnecessary be- cause everything on it is on the Ger- man singles. When put side by side, the color variations are rather strik- ing, but really add nothing to the music. The point of illustrating all this is that it is essentially useless to the consumer to have all these versions exist. The four non-live songs found only on the "Fell On Black Days" singles could easily fit on one single release along with the LP version of the song, and the different cover ver- sions are useless in terms"of the mu- sic. Even with a policy of only four songs on a single there is no need for more than two versions. There would seem, then, to be a policy of label greed at work. Despite the differences in the international fac- ets of A&M, it would seem clear that there are a dfew too many versions tof this single out there. And unlike the release of many versions of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" single, the versions of "Fell On Black Days" have songs a collector would need to acquire. There is certainly more money to be made on this ven- ture. Finally, an observation. An im- ported bootleg costs from $25-$30 and can have from 15 to 25 tracks. The cost of buying the three singles with unique tracks new would cost at least $36. Bootleggers with an ability to move quickly should note this for future ref- erence. I wonder: Will there be a domestic release, too? Soundgarden is a fine unit, but they sure do Issue a whole bunch of singles. r You and your student project teammates? Could be. Because now your group can apply for the 1995 Saturn Award. At Saturn, we believe in the importance of teamwork, so if you're working on a student the 995a project that's making a difference at yourS school or in your community, we want to know about it. 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