The Difficult Second Album

I’m really enjoying the new Killers album. Not a particularly hip thing to say, I grant you (as they battle it out with Robbie at the top of the charts), but true. Track numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 13 and 14 made it onto my iPod – which is a pretty decent score in my book.

Inevitably, there’s many mixed reviews, many of them centring around the “difficult second album” syndrome, a concept that represents an easy journalistic springboard to describe the next work of all those acts fortunate enough to have sold more than seven copies of their first album. This concept came to mind again when I read Naresh Ramchandani’s highly entertaining Guardian article on the new Bravia commercial.

He says a lot of positive things, but makes the point the real fans will be left feeling slightly short-changed. And one does wonder whether the whole article was a bit of an excuse for him to tell the world what his version of the Bravia commercial would have been. Quite cool, however.

On reflection, surely it is a marvellous thing in itself for Fallon that the same analogy is being used for their film as might be used for a rock act’s new album or film star’s questionable sequel? ‘Could the second have ever been as good as the first,’ they cry. Especially when both label and management have instructed the band to deliver ‘more of the same, please’?

Given that the continuous conversations and ongoing discussions we strive to create online provide less opportunity for such expectation and hype, the concept of the difficult second album may be dying a slow death. Which would be a shame. It’s fun. I enjoy the anticipation and the subsequent sense of fulfilment or disappointment. Is there a digital advertising equivalent?