Favorite Concept Album? - Page 2

Depends on how specific the theme is, I'd say, and how well the artist sticks to it. Joy Division's Closer has a pretty unified theme, but that's just who the artist(s) happened to be at the time. Same with Beck's Sea Changes, Big Star Third, and maybe even Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Almost Blue.

That said, Blood on the Tracks is probably at least as much of a concept album as Street Hassle (which is sort of like 2112 - it has one extended, unified piece, but it's surrounded by largely unrelated songs). I'm not sure if I'd classify either as concept albums, though.

In fact, New York may just barely qualify, great as it is. Reed made a big deal at the time that it was supposed to be listened to in one sitting, and that all the songs are about contemporary problems in New York, but, when you consider the rest of the guy's output, you can probably say that about 80 percent of his albums are loosely unified in some way. The only big change in terms of unity from something like The Blue Mask is that Reed is more overtly political on New York. Berlin, Songs for Drella, and Magic and Loss hold together a lot better as unified works, if not necessarily better albums.

Tim Kasher of Cursive/The Good Life had a pretty good run of concept albums - Cursive's Domestica and the Ugly Organ and the Good Life's Album of the Year were all autobiographical narratives to some degree or another. Cursive's Happy Hollow is like a set of short stories on religious repression in a specific small town - sort of like a super cynical Winesberg, Ohio or Spoon River Anthology. He doesn't seem to be continuing this trend (overtly, at least) on either band's latest album, though.

So here's a question: is the concept album dead? I've read a few screeds now to the effect that the music industry is headed back toward the singles-driven model of the fifties, largely due to the domination of downloading. Some people seem to feel that albums as we know them are likely to dwindle in significance. Are bands and artists going to continue to put thought into unified albums knowing that the majority of listeners are likely to hit iTunes and simply grab the tracks they like the most?

This has pretty much been the reality of this decade. I don't think the concept album is dead but the album itself is. In the near future, the only reason to release a traditional album will be if there's a concept behind it. Otherwise, most artists will probably with singles.

For obscurity, the Italian-Slovenian band Devil Doll's "The Girl Who Was Death", which consists of a single 40-minute long piece based on The Prisoner TV show performed by a band with a singer who sounds like he's channeling the Cryptkeeper via sprechgesang. The CD ends with 20 minutes or so of silence and then the band breaks into their cover of the TV series theme song, ending the album at length 66:06.

I guess melding Floyd's Ummagumma with Sammy Hagar can only stretch so far.

These have probably already been listed, BUT...

Both Leviathan & Crack The Skye by Mastadon

Manson's Antichrist Superstar will always have a place in my heart

Ziggy Stardust

and on that note, Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise & Liberation of Niggy Tardust (maybe not a definitive concept album, but most certainly baring a unified theme)

Would you count Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Murder Ballads? Each song is about an untimely death, but they don't form a story together...

Sorry to hear about the tainting of the album for you by your over-enthusiastic bandmates, Dave. If you get a chance to revisit it, hope you like this time around. I discovered it a few years ago when I was getting big into shoegaze. Cheapo's here in Austin, its a godsend for discovering music.

Anyway, having started out with the more ethereal bands, it was a pleasant surprise to hear similar fuzz and distortion applied in a more straightforward (of sorts) rock album.

I really enjoyed The Protomen's self-titled album. They are putting out a follow up Act 2 album to the rock opera hopefully sometime this year, that should be pretty fantastic as well.

I'm thinking that this has been greatly overstated. It may apply for radio pop acts (although I'd argue that studio-hyped radio pop is more in danger of getting crushed by any new paradigm than the concept of the album), but how many serious music fans give a shit about owning an entire Lady Gaga album? Here are some reasons why a purely singles-oriented future won't come to pass:

Touring. Artists tour on the basis of new material. It doesn't make sense to tour on a single song; however, you can get an entire set or close to it with a new album. So regardless of what fans want, it benefits artists (and labels) to have a more substantial product to promote.

Studio time. It just makes more sense for bands to record a set of songs, rather than occasionally stopping into the studio when the mood strikes. And if you've got the songs recorded and mixed, why not release them as a collection?

The appreciation for long-form pieces of artistry. This doesn't necessitate concept albums or anything of the sort. Short stories are just as legitimate an art form as a novel, but people don't typically buy individual short stories. They want collections. I don't think I know any music fans who only download singles, whether it be via legitimate sources or illegal downloads.

They're a bargain. When you buy in bulk, you tend to get a better deal.

There are probably 10 or 20 other good reasons why this thinking doesn't really pan out, from the way music promotion and criticism work to the way that songwriting tends to happen.

I like A Perfect Circle's Thirteenth Step.

I think all of this is true for the time being. But don't you think there's something to be said for the idea that they're only true because that's what the current generation is used to? The people now running the music industry, and to a large extent, the bands themselves, grew up in the seventies and eighties, when albums were the norm. Twenty to thirty years from now, when the iTunes generation is running the show, it could be a very different picture.

Let's not forget that the music industry was very successful for many years before the album-based model became the norm. Artists put out albums when they had enough singles to fill an LP. So while it's true that buying albums is more cost-effective than buying singles, it's possible that what customers will be buying in the future is a collection of what the artist has to offer, rather than a cohesive package intended to hang together. After all, there's little point in conceiving an album that way when the average listener is going to load it on to their iPod and hit shuffle.

I just think it's important to never say never when it comes to how people listen to music. I certainly didn't think I'd be walking around with a device that holds my entire library.

I think for your careerist artists and rock bands who live and breathe with the songwriting process and want to evolve as musicians, recording entire albums will never become a thing of the past. The one thing that will certainly change, and is already changing, is how those artists get out their music.

If anything, the term "record label" has a much more chance of becoming obsolete quicker than the word "album".

The bottom line is, those that tend to download the majority of their music via singles and select tracks available on iTunes probably are the same folks who go to concerts and only know the radio and Mtv tunes. They don't give a shit about having an album experience anyway.

Seeing the New York tour at the St. James Theater, where Reed came out and said "We're going to play the whole album, from beginning to end", was a great live music moment for me.

And I love Street Hassle. It's an album that dares you to hate it, then Bruce Springsteen shows up.

My favorite "concept album" is The Nightfly by Donald Fagen. Every time I listen to it I am thrilled by its jazzy and wild vision of youthful 50s nostalgia.

I agree with pretty much everything you said in this post.

The future generations who grew up with with free downloadable music right from the start will/have a very different conception of music that we do.

But the artists won't. It will always make more financial and practical sense to record a bunch of songs at the same time than to record them one at a time. And if you've got them recorded, and they represent what you're about as an artist at that point, why not release them as a set?

I can see our perceptions of what constitutes an album changing (in terms of length), but it just makes more sense to release song collections of some sort than singles. If you're a visual artist, you'll paint and sell pictures individually, but the best way to get people to pay attention to your stuff is to present a bunch of pieces at a showing. If you're a poet, you'll want your individual poems published in journals, but you're ultimately going to want to put a collection out.

Even if music listeners decide that they're only going to download certain songs, it's in the musician's best interest to offer a bunch of new material at once.

Also, I think our perceptions are slightly skewed because we're coming into the era of downloadable music with a long tradition of songs that we've already heard. We download individual songs because we were introduced to them via a soon-to-be-outmoded system (the big labels, radio play, popularity that was partially derived from album success). It's easy to know which individual songs to download now, because there's an established process of discovery. But it's exactly that crucial process that's overlooked when people talk about how we're moving toward a model fixated on individual songs. This isn't going to be the 50s, where a few tastemakers will be able to make a case for a new Chuck Berry.

Consider how fragmented the music market is nowadays. Popularity isn't necessarily dictated by the singles charts; people often discover music through friends and music blogs on the web rather than the radio (which, with satellite and online radio stations, is hardly the singular force it once was in driving popularity). Where exactly would one learn of a single song that's worth purchasing? The web. And what's the best way to get someone's attention on the web? Coverage on music blogs and the like. And what's the best way to get coverage? By establishing a record of releasing good songs. Given short attention spans, this is not something best achieved by sporadically releasing one song after another.

Yes, here we go. It's impossible to listen to just part of this album. You have to run through the whole thing. And it's elliptical so you can start anywhere.

Big bonus if you have the full-size, fold-out album sleeve so you can read the fake newspaper articles while it plays.

If there's one thing I miss about the LP, it's those bigass foldout covers. Some artists really went all-out with those things. People who discovered Rush's 2112 on CD really missed a lot of the atmosphere of it. Extensive liner notes really went the way of the dinosaur, too.

The album isn't going to die, that's like supposing paint isn't going to splash onto canvases anymore, because artists have Photoshop. If they don't want to make concept records, it's a dead art form, which should be observed in museums.

Let's not forget that pop music has been driven by singles, not albums, over the decades. I really don't see things today being much different, except now the listener can delete a track from an ipod that he or she would have skipped on the LP.

Most people aren't avid music listeners. It has always been this way. What I see as one's short attention span to music is, to them, an attention span directed at something other than music, the tunes supplying a background compliment to it.

This can all be condensed into the worry that others don't share your interests - a thread which runs thru every website I've visited that's full of intelligent people. I would like to confirm that they don't.

'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway'- Genesis
'Tales from Topographic Oceans'- Yes
'Joe's Garage'- Frank Zappa

Being over at my mom's for Easter today reminded me of an awesome record I listened to as a kid, The Point! by Harry Nilsson. Definitely made for kids, but had some great songs on it. I could definitely see the allstar tribute/revamp thing happen to it some day. I remember I used to put the record on and actually lay down on the floor and read along with the included comic book. Highly recommended if you can find it, you don't have to have kids to enjoy it either. Oh, and at some point they did an animated film out of it with Alan Thicke narrating. Take that for what it's worth I guess.

Derek Riggs hasn't done a cover for Iron Maiden since 'The X Factor'. That's a real shame, too.

I am obsessed with Devil Doll, I think all of his albums are concepts in a way. (I think Eliogabalus is the only non-concept one). My personal favorite is the remix (not in the way most would think) album The Sacrilege of Fatal Arms.

I was surprised to see Mr. Doctor reveal his identity last year.

Yeah, it really is. Though I do like Tim Bradstreet's cover for A Matter of Life and Death.

Technically he did half of the Brave New World cover (the Eddie in the sky part), but got pissed when they used a computer artist to fill in the skyline below and also rejected his concept for the Wicker Man single.

He did do the cover for the Somewhere Back in Time greatest hits album, though.





And on the subject of concept albums, I really like Maiden's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.

Although very loose in concept, I'll hold up Marvin Gaye's What's Going On as a great concept album, although he was riffing on issues of the day and there's no real narrative, he manages to hold closely to the theme of war and poverty.

I've become addicted to Prince's BATMAN album lately. It is actually very good; SHAUN OF THE DEAD gets it wrong again! There's a lot of good, stripped-down funky tunes, Prince's steamiest sex ballad, and a unified theme.

I'm not 100% sure what the unified theme is, though. Something about Batman having sex and drinking 6 razorblades out of a paper cup. Well, I'm sure it makes sense to Prince!

I know what you mean. The music seems to be so unified and slightly removed from the rest of the artist's catalog that it almost makes itself into a concept album, even without the benefit of a tight lyrical concept. It's kind of like Astral Weeks and The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle in this way.

Richard Thompson's "1000 Years of Popular Music." Asked in 1999 by Playboy magazine to submit (along with other musicians) a list of the ten "Greatest Songs of the Milennium", he decided to take them at their word and go back 1,000 years. Somehow, his list didn't get into that issue, but he turned the concept into a great live show that's available with slightly different setlists, depending if you buy the CD only from his website, or the commercial CD/DVD package. Childe ballads, madrigals, union organizing songs, big-band crooning, folk blues, jazz, Gilbert & Sullivan, Berlin, Lennon/McCartney, Difford/Tilbrook, right up through "Oops... I Did It Again." A great concept, well-delivered, and a heck of a lot of fun.

I'm also fond of Dave Alvin's "West of the West": songs spanning the breadth of the California experience from folks like Merle Haggard, John Fogerty, John Stewart, and Brian Wilson. Granted, he's a better writer than he is a singer, but some of the material is so strong you hardly notice.

?
Metal Machine Music--Lou Reed
Trans--Neil Young

(Been a while with both, curious if they qualify; probably more 'fuck you' than concept!)

Here, My Dear--Marvin Gaye (more so than What's Going On)

For Lou, that was always less a concept than a lifestyle (Lester Bangs said that MMM was the perfect album to play when you wake up with a hangover; it would let you know just how fucked you were going to feel for the rest of the day).

As for Neil-- let's not forget Everybody's Rockin'.

The Mars Volta were mentioned, so Frances The Mute is probably my favorite modern concept album.

But overall, I would say my favorite is Brian Wilson's teenage symphony to god. The Beach Boy's SMiLE.

Because it's one of the most criminally overlooked albums in rap history, let me throw in 'Tricks Of The Shade' by The Goats here, as a counterweight. Fantastic album (you probably know the song 'Typical American' if nothing else), best stage act by a hiphop crew + live band EVER, then extremely disappointing second album, then breakup. Check it out, seriously.

Also, my favourite funk concept record (since all the rock has already been mentioned here): MOTOR BOOTY AFFAIR by Parliament.. crazy underwater theme sustained in lyrics AND music, which at times actually sounds like it was recorded underwater.

As far as a straight narrative being told, nothing beats the fantastic characters John Darnielle created in The Mountain Goats' Tallahassee. It's like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" set in a rural plantation home. They hate each other, they love each other, they're stuck with each other.

Seeing as it hasn't been mentioned yet, i'll add Dredg's El Cielo. It focuses, oddly enough, on sleep paralysis but it's truly marvelous.

I'll have to second Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, for that, like many others already mentioned, am the tits.

The Coheed and Cambria albums are sweet too, (though, they're not quite all 'classics'. Catchy though.)

I think my favourite 'concept album' though would have to be Outside by David Bowie. Granted, its not his most lauded period, but i'm a HUGE Bowie fan and am really digging his 90's output at the moment. And there are some fantastic tunes on there, even if the concept is a bit odd. Shame he never finished the supposed continuing narrative.

And if Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age counts, i'll have that too, for it is awesome.

I'll second this one. The songs aren't really distinct enough to stand on their own separately (as far as radio friendly singles are concerned), but when listened to together, the addiction-recovery theme works extremely well and hits some interesting check points along the way.

Also, I'll nominate Eels' "Electroshock Blues" as one of my favorite concept albums. I always feel like I've had a very "complete" experience whenever I listen to that one.

I know it's been mentioned previously but Ziltoid The Omniscient has to get my vote.

"They hide their finest bean!"

Jethro Tull - A Passion Play
Iron Maiden - Seventh Son
Pink Floyd - Animals
Elton John - Captain Fantastic
Rush - Power Windows



(and how The Hazards of Love could qualify is beyond me, it's only been out for a month. Something like that needs to marinate.)