I’m really sick of long pauses in songs to hide “hidden tracks”.

Hidden tracks used to wow my hard-core fan inside, now they just bore me. What’s the point?

I think my “hidden track” chastity busted with Tool’s Undertow album, ending on track 69 with Disgustipated. The CD would go through 50 odd tracks each lasting the minimum length [1 second?] so the display would seem to tick along until it reached 69. Disgustipated is a great song and worthy of being hidden in such a clever way. Or maybe not. Either way, bands have been pulling tricks with vinyl and now CDs, to give us… something? I’m not really sure what.

When I’m listening to the Black Angels – Passover [great album] I’m usually working on something and when the last track plays I’m expecting something to come on. [The Black Keys] But it doesn’t. It never does. 8min.+ of silence and then a cool little track about the Iraq War comes on. It’s a great track, but why the 8 minutes Black Angels? Is that necessary? Oh… You wanted to give an homage to old vinyl cuts? Save it for the vinyl edition.

So I go to the next album in my library…

The Black Keys – The Big Come Up. Great! Love the tunes. What’s this? 20min.+ pause at the end? Damnit! The Album Leaf, Damien Rice, The Aliens, these are just a few of the offenders on my iTunes playlist. I searched further, looking for 10min.+ songs on my playlist, and I didn’t find as many as I thought I would while on the warpath. In fact, my 23:45 track of Lizard by King Crimson had zero silence. What bad-asses! I guess they don’t make ‘em like they used to…

But seriously, bands: the hidden tracks are just tired, give ‘em up! Silence is the antithesis of music, why add the filler?

On another note, do you put sentence ending punctuation before quotation [."] marks or after? [".]