Starmen.Net

In my younger and more formative years I was very pick-and-choose with my music, the skip and fast forward buttons were my friends. This carried later on into my early adulthood when I got my first iPod, a free 4GB for opening a bank account (When I first got it it could hold about 1,200 songs, with the power creep of song file quality its now down to about 700).

The point is, that I rarely listened to full albums and later on it became uneconomic for me to put a full album on my iPod.

Lately though things have been changing. I’m using the iPod less, and have begun saving up for a record player, and I’ve just been chilling out and listening to a full album the way someone might watch a movie.

What are your favorite, as a whole, albums of all time? What are you listening to these days?

Personally, even with the world’s smallest iPod I still made room for the whole of Franz Ferdinand’s You Could Have it so Much Better It works amazing as whole (Even with the sinking realization that every single song on this album is about a break-up); the self-titled EP was great but they really pulled everything together for this. Someday I will actually have to listen to one of the newer albums.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of Bowie (Hunky-Dory, Aladdin Sane, Station to Station, Diamond Dogs when I want to freak myself out.)

The best new album of the last few years (With a nod to Taylor Swift of course) imo, is Childish Gambino’s Because the Internet He had a few short albums before that, but in Glover’s more formative years working on his raps it felt like he’s trying to channel Kanye. He’s good, but its not his own voice. He found it in Because the Internet, and its amazing.

But really, are you eating though?

Album experience, eh? I wanna say I appreciate a good album experience, but pawing through my library, I have a hard time identifying many albums I love only (or even mostly) for their album experience.

Maybe it’s just because I listen to music to be engaged, rather than to chill. An album that’s better as an ‘experience’ rather than ‘a bunch of cool songs’ is probably… boring.

But, of course, there’s more than one way to have a good album experience.

One way is to have a fair number of tracks fade into each other, some callback tracks, or interstitial tracks. These are the albums that you can’t just put on shuffle without having some weird tracks filter through. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is like that. So is the iconoclastic chip album, Coin’s Architects of Character.

Another way is to have a good “A Side/B Side” setup, with lots of poppy tracks on the first half of the album, and more subtle and experimental stuff in the second half. The A Sides get you invested in listening, while the B Sides reward repeat listens. Cashier No. 9’s To The Death of Fun is like this (A side, B side). A more famous example is Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes: everybody knows Home, but did you know there’s some pretty cool tracks on the backside of the album, too?

Another another way to have a good album experience is more nebulous. Sometime’s there’s just albums stuffed full of good tracks, that just kinda work when they’re put all together, and in the order they’re presented.

Case in point: the criminally neglected album You’re My Lover Now by now-defunct punk outfit The Teeth. It opens with the jaunty “Molly Make Him Pay”:

And then 10 all really good tracks later, things get gradually boozier and more anxious, following the ‘protagonist’ across multiple alcohol-soaked misadventures (attending a ritzy wedding in The Trumpets Blared, getting tossed in the drunk tank in Yellow), all stumbling into the title track:

It’s definitely an album I can bust out and sit through like a beloved movie, and I usually do on roadtrips and stuff.

There are a few for me, and almost all of them are some kind of metal. Edge of Sanity’s album Crimson is clearly intended to be listened to all at once because it is a single 45 minute song (although broken into several movements).

Deathspell Omega’s Paracletus has plenty of good songs, but it really shines when you listen to it as an album. There’s just something about the way the songs work together, it sets a (very dark and chaotic) tone.

Last year, Old Man Gloom released The Ape of God which I can pretty much only listen to a disc at a time. It’s a double album and I rarely have time for both discs, but I love the way it plays.

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven by Godspeed You! Black Emperor is pretty great to listen to as an album, but the songs are so long and have so many samples and weird transitions that they don’t stand alone very well.

Probably an expected answer, but Pink Floyd’s work is very “whole album” centric, ESPECIALLY everything Atom Heart Mother onward.

Talking about classics that everyone’s heard of, I gotta say Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a fantastic listen from beginning to end. Everybody talks about it, yeah, but the diverse amount of stuff that the four packed into this one is pretty astounding.

Earthboundian Folk:

You’ve gotta admit that Radiohead’s King of Limbs has an awesome cover:

Can we actually just change this thread’s name to “Catchall Radiohead Topic”?

Pretty much everything they’ve done, for the most part, falls into the Album Experience catagory c:

Anything by Pink Floyd (except for Obscured by Clouds) is awesome, Superbanjo.

^ Seconding this. Obscured by Clouds is nice to come back to occasionally when you just want some easy rock.

It’s definitely quite different from the other Pink Floyd albums, but that’s to be expected since it’s a movie soundtrack. And it’s nowhere near my favorite, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes blast “The Gold, It’s In The…” while driving on the highway.

^they reused a couple of ideas they came up with during those sessions, notably the melody for “us and them” and chord progression for “great gig in the sky”, but none of the actual recordings from the soundtrack sessions are on the album