Personally, I’m thrilled at the album’s under-performance in regard to its long-promised demise. CDs pour in for review, an avalanche of them, gleaming in their cover art, ready for a spin. Last week, a seven-inch vinyl single showed up.

It’s long been considered orthodoxy, especially by record companies, that CDs are on the brink of being irrevocably fractured by the wonderful ease of downloading single tracks. Apparently, our microscopic attention spans will no longer be able to handle the overwhelm of 12, 13, even 14 tracks by the same artist, all in a row.

So what’s going on? Why aren’t musicians gnashing their teeth in despair and recording nothing but single songs? Why is the Advocate’s Local Spins feature, now some 18 months old, able to supply readers, without cease, a stream of locally produced records?

True, the Valley is awash in so many musicians it’s hard to believe anybody living here hasn’t made several albums, but there’s more afoot than that. As WRSI DJ Bill Childs (of “Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child” fame) told me, kids love CDs. They’re tangible manifestations of their favorite sounds, not mere titles on an iPod.

It’s not just the kids’ stuff, though. Musicians of every kind keep making the darned things, from U2 to the localest of the local. It’s the latter point that seems to hold the most water. If you’re a local band, playing local shows, you want to promote yourself when you play a show, not later, when someone from France stumbles upon your site while searching for American decadence or gumbo recipes. What better way to promote yourself on the spot than having a box of cleverly-sized CDs on hand to send home with each and every one of the screaming minions who’s willing to pony up a few dollars?

There’s something permanent (at least so far) about CDs, too. For those of us who make music under the radar of giant corporate entities, CDs are proof we’ve accomplished something with all that basement strumming, and that feels good, even if Capitol Records isn’t distributing the results.

Then there’s the aesthetic side of the equation. A proper album is like a story, a lyrical arc that leads somewhere, that has a beginning, middle and end. If you like a band, you want to go on a journey, not just get a postcard from their travels. A proper album makes you feel like you’ve hung around with the band for a while, and what more could a fan desire?

As I type, I’m listening to Frost Heaves, a new CD by Daniel Hales (who is, in the interest of full disclosure, a longtime friend) & the Frost Heaves. It’s a good CD, but beyond any critical judgments I bring to listening, I hear the results of a tremendous amount of time and effort. That’s true of every local CD—a lot of musicians, I daresay most of them, have dreams of fame and fortune. But putting together an album without the money, time and promotional efforts that labels often bring to the party is a pretty pure thing, an effort usually forged in love of music, a celebration of the pure pleasure of plucking a string, of glorying in the sound it makes.

That, in the end, is what makes listening to albums, especially independent ones, worthwhile. Local music coverage can tend toward the sycophantic and therefore offer little clue to what you’ll actually discover inside a jewel case. But the expansive nature of the medium means you get to hear the real breadth of an artist’s playing, the completion of a full thought, enough to make up your own mind and learn the contours of the Valley’s soundscape.

Valley bands keep trying to make it easy, putting out CDs that lurk in most of the Valley’s music stores. The form is far from dead, and that’s especially true of local efforts. At the risk of sounding like a cornball music evangelist, you owe it to yourself to check out the sounds that emanate from the (cacophonous) Valley. You might even be saving a supposedly endangered species while you’re at it.