Albums should be listened to in entirety as they are a single piece of art.
Having grown up late 90s into the 2000s I went from buying cds to lime wire to spotify.
In the last 6 months I have found such a greater appreciation for just putting on a whole album and listening to it front to back.
I feel there is a huge loss when going from one artist to another to another all random.
Today I am listening to Refused, The Shape Of Punk To Come
190 replies
Depending on the album.
Some albums are made like that, as a cohesive work.
Others are just a bunch of songs put together by approximately release date.
I'd say most albums are a collection of the songs the band picked out to make it and then arranged in a way that fit the medium back in the day and feels like it makes sense.
OP and others here in the comments are reading way too much into that they have become accustomed to how one song follows another. It's not like most bands play concerts in the album order either.
Personally I liked making mix tapes for myself from vinyl to listen to individual songs in new orders and I really liked when CDs were introduced and you could play shuffle and bring attention to every song as it was a little surprise every time.
That said, I'm glad you've found attentive listening to music, OP. Keep listening to full albums if this helps you do it.
Most, yes. Then you get to producers like Alan Parsons (Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon, all of his own stuff...) He's rare in the industry, but many have followed his style of album arrangement since then.
Absolutely this.
Now, when I was in High School, I realized that I had owned "The Wall" for 3 months and still never had 90 minutes of consecutive available listening time to listen to it all the way through... parent enforced bedtime was a big part of that, but still... life can be too hectic sometimes.
Yes and no. You gotta listen to the whole thing all the way through at least once. Some albums require repeat listening. Some, you just take the good, toss the bad.
If an album only has a couple of songs I enjoy, I tend not to continue following that artist.
For artists that I do enjoy, and I discovered this 40 years ago, I find the best songs on the album are generally not the ones they release as singles.
And some I don't think are so great but after a few listening I find them great.
Yes. They sometimes need to grow on you. I found that a lot with artists like David Byrne that reinvent their sounds every album. The shift can take a little getting used to.
Yep. Nothing felt worse than spending 20€ in a CD and realizing that, apart from the hit single, the rest of it was pretty bad.
There were some where the hit single on the album wasn't even good, 'cause the version you liked turned out to be the radio edit!
Sometimes it takes several listens for me to appreciate a track; sometimes those tracks become my favourites from the album.
This you?
Absolutely, another brick in the wall is awesome to listen too as an album.
I'm annoyed by the remaster i bought on cd that cut the songs in the wrong spot so it would go quiet for for a second af the wrong moment of the song
Agree, The Wall should be listened to from start to end in one sitting in your life at least a few times.
The 1990 Berlin Concert video is also worth a watch...
Is there a PF song where that's not a pretty big exaggeration? I feel it's actually 1-2 minutes tops in at least most songs
The composition "Shine on you crazy diamond" from the Album "Wish you where here" is what this meme is referring to and has no lyrics for 8min 40sec.
Edit: changed song to composition as it's 23+ min long
I performed that song in my youth. I'd play the keyboard solo during the intro and then rush to the microphone while holding the final note on the keyboard when the song is about to enter.
Good point. I love that (I'm going to call it a) song
Echoes and Shine on you Crazy Diamond come to mind.
Two of their best songs too, imo
Iirc, Meddle is a bit like this too.
Depends on the album. Some albums really are like that, but others are just a compiled collection of singles.
Yup. I have very diverse taste un music and I found that some albums are merely a collection of songs written around the same time. While other albums have a set of tracks that share some motifs, and placing them in the right order is important.
And then there are more extreme examples where one song is supposed to lead into the next one with no hard border between the two
This is how I listen to music, but also this isn't a shower thought, it's just your opinion.
The name of the community is just a suggestion in most of the communities here.
Is that a shower thought?!
Even "suggestion" is putting it strongly!
I had it in the shower listening to an album.
It would make an awesome [email protected] though.
I don't think it's unpopular, I'm also not saying they should be exclusively listened to in album form just that a lot of music i listen to is enhanced by doing the album
The whole album? Was it a double?
For many, absolutely! That's how they were intended, and they deserve it.
Others, it's just ten songs randomly arranged.
Pretty good litmus test on whether they're good musicians or just corporate karaoke.
Is a book of short stories or poems not art, just because it is not a monolithic novel.
An Album with 10 independent songs can still be a fully artistic package. Maybe each song is ment to be experience on it's own. Maybe the art form is to deliver a succinct and complete piece in 3-5 minutes?
Agreed. There’s so much pointless elitism and snobbishness in this thread; very disappointing from so-called music fans.
Disappointing, but not surprising.
If someone took a photograph of the Mona Lisa, do they deserve all the accolades of Da Vinci?
Of course not. Feel free to say thank you for showing this to me, but that's about all the credit they deserve.
Sorry if you're a member of Maroon 5, or some other band that purchases random songs and performs them as your own, but to me, that's the same as taking photos of OTHER people's paintings and putting them in a coffee table book.
A non-sequitur reply that says a completely different thing than what was discussed in the thread.
I thought it made sense in context, but maybe not since so many people seem to not understand what I'm trying to say.
Plenty of very talented people write individual songs instead of conceptual albums, and songs on a record often sound cohesively only because they were written in approximately the same period. I don't know where you got the notion that it's either whole albums or songs written by others, nothing in between.
For example, Velvet Underground operated pretty much in pop industry's recording mode despite their experimental approach to the sound and themes. 'The Velvet Underground & Nico' straight up opens with one of the poppiest songs they have, and the tracks aren't thematically linked aside from being generally about people at The Factory. Songs about drugs and BDSM are interspersed with heartfelt songs about Edie Sedgwick, Warhol, and a poor girl who wants to party. They also recorded a bunch of great songs that went unreleased for fifteen years, until the compilation 'VU'.
I don't know where anyone got that notion, because that's definitely not what I was trying to say.
I mean, that's how your comments read.
Nobody here brought up cover songs though...?
Did you not know that record labels buy pre-written songs for bands to play as their own?
WHOAAAAA NO WAY
Hahaha, I'll be stealing that!
9 times out of 10, I prefer full cohesive albums.
That said, this is an absurd statement. Musical talent has nothing to do with it.
I'm not saying that the musicians in corporate karaoke bands aren't talented, but I'll give more credit to a composer than a talented cover band any day.
You're free to feel differently.
Who is talking about cover bands???
I could probably name dozens of amazing albums that are not "cohesive," that contain no cover songs.
You honestly seem confused.
You didn't understand my point, and I'm over it, so let's just move on.
I understood it just fine... It just wasn't really related to what we were talking about.
Nobody was talking about covers or "corporate karaoke bands," but you.
Listen to a (nearly always incohesive) Ween album, and dare to call them that. No cover songs either.
Not my favorite band by any means, just the first that came to mind when thinking of bands who usually opt out of making their albums sound cohesive.
Guided by Voices is another that just came to mind.
You'll just have to trust me when I say you're arguing against a point I never made. I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I don't know who you are arguing with.
Yeah that's what I think too, an album if approached as a whole piece of art is great compared to random singles
This varies. Some albums are absolutely meant to be listened to back to back in order. Others are just a collection of songs and nothing is lost by missing them into a random playlist.
True of some albums, not all. A lot of albums just have one good song. One of the best concerts I ever went to was a playthrough of an entire album because it was its 10th anniversay and I'd listened to it so many times I knew exactly what was coming next. Best feeling
Yeah, it really depends on the album and the way the artist has put it together. Any sort of "mix" album if matters very little the order you play it in, or which songs. Something Iike a concert recording, an (e.g. Pink Floyd) album where one song transitions to another, or a Rock Opera that tells a story across songs, the specific songs played and order can matter a lot!
I've got my own music collection on a self-hosted server which I can stream to my devices, and would love to have some sort of "not a singular/standalone" flag for songs which really don't fit or sound good outside of the larger album when I'm playing random/mix mode.
I went to a 10th anniversary playthrough. Regrettably, my tracklist sequence was alphabetical from a flash drive in the car :( still, very enjoyable to hear just a single slice of time rather than a spotty "greatest hits" collection that don't align with my opinion. 12/12 would do again
Mine was a band called Why? and the album was Alopecia, what was yours?
Maybe back in the day when bands would spend months and months assembling an album that had a generally cohesive style. Now it seems a lot of bands throw a bunch of stuff at the wall hoping something will stick. A good album today is the exception, not the expectation.
Not all art belongs in the Louvre.
That happened back in the day too. Low effort releases are nothing new, we just ignore/forget all the bad stuff and end up with rose-tinted glasses.
Yeah, prior to Pet Sounds and Rubber Soul, it's basically what every album was.
Speaking of low effort releases, a lot of "Deluxe Editions" have come out lately which have "rare recordings" of the same tracks at different live performances. As "unlistenable" goes, hearing Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting for the third time in 20 minutes gets to be challenging.
Yeah all the music from my youth is good now days is bad (because I don't remember the bad)
I get that, but also movies are a single piece of art, and sometimes I just want to jump to the machete battle scene in The Raid. I still love the whole thing, but sometimes I only got like 5 minutes until my lunch break is over.
I used to have a friend who would ALWAYS play between 30 minutes and 1 hour of the start of Ace Ventura 2, then stop it and play it again from the beginning. Fucking infuriating
With a small child this is how I experienced Demon Hunters. Completely didnt realise there was a 2nd half for about 4 months.
Does anybody still subscribe to HBO? Back in the 1980s we had HBO and I had an afternoon-evening shift at a store nearby. HBO would start a movie in the early afternoon, I'd get to watch half of it before I had to leave for my shift. Luckily, they'd also usually show the exact same movie later that night - timed such that when I got home from work I could sit down and see the end of it starting from about 5 minutes before I had to leave.
This depends. A lot of albums aren't coherent "pieces of art", and the track listing is ordered and selected by execs other than the artist, so it's kind of meaningless. "Greatest hits" albums are also not relevant.
But yeah, this is a big reason why I went back to vinyl and cassette - I select something, put it on, and listen to it straight through without skipping, because that would require me to get up off my chair and walk across the room. Life hack amiright.
A fun counterpoint to the "albums weren't meant to be shuffled" argument is Apollo 18 by TMBG.
On the track list, "Fingertips" is track 17, followed by "Space Suit" at track 38. That's because Fingertips is actually 21 mini songs (mostly 10 seconds or less), each with their own track, that are supposed to appear randomly between full songs when you listen on shuffle.
On the other hand, modern streaming services usually just have a single track for Fingertips, so I'm now used to hearing those 21 mini songs in the original, "play it straight through" order.
I mean they do play Fingertips as a single song live, because it's hilarious and fun.
Yeah unfortunately I disagree. There are plenty of albums where I like literally one song and don't much care for anything else on it.
Or albums where the artist gets "creative" and interleaves tracks of noise with the songs.
The only albums I listen to entirely from start to finish, are those where all the songs actually connect to each other. Most albums are not like that.
There are tons of concept albums where the songs do not directly connect to each other that still deserve to be listened to as a cohesive unit.
For every concept album there are a hundred collections of songs.
you like Coletta at all?
Yes, but also no.
There was a time when albums were created by artists with the intent that they should be listened to start to finish.
But at some point albums changes to being a collection of songs trying to be “hits”
Albums as monolithic artistic creations definitely peaked in the 70s-80s, but albums as a simple collection of songs have existed for almost as long as recorded music. Until the late-1960s it was the norm; we’re just experiencing a return to that being the dominant format.
Depends who you are listening to i think. Plenty of artists still writing albums instead of songs.
Yeah that's what so fresh was for
I generally agree. However, especially nowadays (and back in the early 60s before Pet Sounds and Rubber Soul), not all albums are written to be listened to as a whole. We've gone back to (many, not all) albums just being a collection of singles.
For better or worse (worse imo).
You have to seek out albums these days, you can find some good ones still from skilled artists
Eh, dont agree. Yeah, I think listening to a whole album is important on occasion and can give a cool perspective. But I've found that the range of things I enjoy increases with shuffle. There's so much stuff that I love... in unexpected short spurts. Im not talking hits, but just random decent stuff. I think there's something lost when an album has to be good enough that you intentionally pull it off the shelf and listen to it for an hour. Hordes of cool things won't meet that level.
As are songs. I have a playlist with about 3000 songs I like in one folder, and it'll jump through genres from song to song. I like all the songs, so I don't care about mood changes.
I also find there are album songs on most albums that I like that I don't particularly enjoy or feel like filler.
Ohh I should try that. Just dump the entire music folder into VLC and shuffle.
Might encourage me to remove the random crap that got downloaded and left in the unsorted folder years ago... Some of it is good, some isn't.
Try out smart playlists. Plex, navidrome, etc. Let's you set up a list that will only play songs you havent heard in months
There was a thing called the AcousticBrainz project that enables smart playlists like that which also keep "similar sounding" songs together. You can have a folder with Metallica and Enya, and if you pick Enya mood tracks, the algorithm can pick and choose through the Metallica catalog to play for you only those tracks that are most "Enya-like" - unfortunately, the program was shutdown a couple of years ago - seems like interest / funding was lacking for an open project that does Spotify / Pandora like music classification without also pushing promoted tracks at the same time.
Wouldnt Plex require connection though? Don't really want to run a Plex server on each device either. VLC is local and I can just periodically sync the music library when on the same LAN.
You can download playlists just fine. I'll go on vacation all the time and listen offline the whole time.
And you dont need to run a server on each device. Plexamp and/or Symphonium are just apps for your phone. It's all "local" when the laptop with the server/music and your phone are in your own house, especially navidrome. If you want to hit that server on the internet, thats a homelab project to dip your toes into when you feel like it.
My phone isn't always on my LAN and I don't always have internet access when away from it.
Yeah that's how I used to be but I feel something is lost with a lot of albums
Why I wrote a somewhat bad shuffle utility so sometimes it doesn't select a random song from my music library but sometimes picks the next neighboring song file for those album-specific messages from the artist.
There's a handful of songs that I can think of that absolutely benefit from being played with their neighbor on the album they're from. Some songs really shouldn't be played with or it the neighbor too. And every so often, my shuffle will put these songs together (and I've got a large collection) and it feels like something special has happened.
While I agree that there definitely are albums where listening to them in their entirety enhances the experience (Metropolis 2, Octavarium), I generally prefer picking out the best songs of an album and listening to those instead.
Not all albums are made of bangers and have songs I’d never listen to a second time.
Genesis' ABACAB seemingly put "Whodunnit?" on there just to make listening to the whole album... challenging.
How very prog of you. 🤙
Some albums, yes. But not all.
Album ≠ album. There are certainly ones worthy of listening to them as a whole. But there are plenty of albums that are just utter garbage too. The war on the single by record companies in the 90s produced a number of albums that were at best a couple of okay singles plus 8-10 pure fillers. Name another Chumbawamba song, you can't without googling.
In a way we are reverting back to the 1950s where the single reigned supreme and albums were an afterthought. Now the single song does better than an album again. Some musicians release every streamlined Spotify curated 2 minute song as a "single." Since most of it is done digitally only why not?
Dogma is useless.
Bella Ciao by Chumbawumba is the definitive version as far as I am concerned. Likewise The Day The Nazi Died is pretty good too.
lol, I can [name Chumbawamba songs], but only their 80s stuff when they were an anarchopunk band - quite a shock when, years later, I discovered they were the ones singing that radio song. I knew them like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWLHpuLrpyk
Amnesia.
But point taken.
I can’t remember?
The Digger's Song (granted, they didn't write it)
An album built to be an album is best listened to as an album in my opinion rather then on random etc
I don't particularly like singles. If an album is full of filler, ok, I'll just dislike it and move on.
I don't think op is arguing that just because albums are better than single songs when they're good, that all albums are good.
Yeah I'm not saying all albums are great, just that I find the music I listen to is often better as an album then a single intermixed with other songs.
I definitely agree with you
God one of my favorite albums of all time is Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Die Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever by Explosions in the Sky.
While I enjoy shuffling my music for the chaos my library brings, the way each song blends into each other in the studio album is my absolute favorite. It really makes the experience
Yeah, I never really got it when people started listening to things on shuffle. I like albums. I recently got rid of Spotify and going back to just having albums and VLC on my phone is so nice.
I really don't care personally. Add I get older I just let it play through because I'm lazy, and I have like 40k in records now so choosing songs isn't really a thing.
I think it depends on the artist and the time. Im a big jethro tull fan and they crafted their albums very specifically. You could sorta see it in particular in this period as they always ended with these short songs that were kinda a goodbye. Its kinda hard to describe but when you listen to their stuff form the 60-80 its pretty clear. What gets me is streaming. The thing with streaming is if I call up an album it will default to remastered one which pretty much adds back things from the cuttting room floor appened to the end. Which completely ruins the experience. Drives me nuts.
You don't listen to "Thick as a brick" on shuffle?
Thick as a Brick is in my random playlist, it comes up about once every 6 weeks...
Nah, most songs suck. I'll listen to the one or two good ones.
depends, some artists just have a few good songs and a lot of filler. In my experience, the further away from mainstream pop you go the higher the likelihood to encounter great albums with no filler.
Sounds like you're just making your own albums
good albums should
there are lots of albums that aren't good albums
that said, the albums I listen to often are absolutely front to back listening
This is part of why I prefer Bandcamp over Spotify. Throw on a whole album, give it a listen, if I come back and do that a few times it's probably worth buying. And then it's mine forever without DRM.
Bandcamp is the way
Bandcamp recently sacked like half their staff. It's still the better choice over Spotify but other, cooperatively owned options do exist.
https://merlo.space/
https://jam.coop/
https://subvert.fm/
Absolutely not, most albums have a bunch of skippable junk between the interesting stuff, and exist best as a few tracks on a mixtape. There are a small number of albums that are best experienced as a single piece - e.g Pink Flag, In The Court Of The Crimson King, Woof. - but they're exceptions rather than the norm.
Listening to album is a way to listen to a full story. While I listen to some Bollywood movie album, it feels like watching the movie again and going through that story
Any movie album you would recommend?
‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ and the sequel both have banging songs. Idk if the full soundtracks are available anywhere, though.
Of western films, try ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’, ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’, Nino Rota's soundtrack for ‘Amarcord’, Kenji Kawai's ‘Ghost In The Shell’, and David Lynch's films: ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Blue Velvet’. Joe Hisaishi made great music for both Takeshi Kitano and Ghibli. Philip Glass' ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ is famously the only sound in the film; and his ‘Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters’ is also very cool. ‘Chinatown’ is pretty much a definitive album of dark jazz. John Lurie made music for ‘Down By Law’ in which he also acted.
Gangs of wasseypur's song are bangers, I'll be sure to watch the movies. Thanks!
Mixtapes predate cds by a bit there, kid.
They do not, however, predate albums. CDs were not the inception of the album.
There are maybe a dozen albums I like enough to listen to from head to toe.
If a lot of cases, the band knows they only have a few really good tracks and struggle to put enough on the album for it to sell.
No, not at all. There are usually only a few pieces i like.
That's because you grew up in an era where the Album wasn't an art form any more. Today it's just a collection of random songs.
In the 60s, the Beatles made the album an art form of its own, and other bands embraced the model. The cover(s), the inner sleeves, even the labels on the records, all became part of the artistic conception.
The music was carefully programmed, with a compelling opening, and a closing song at the end of side one. Then the flip, and side two has to open with a bang, and end with a big finish. The songs between were expected to carry the vibe of the album forward, and many albums were even built around a story, called Concept Albums.
When it was finished, that LP album was a fully contained artwork by a true musical artist, the way a book, or painting is the final representation of those artists artistic concepts.
It started to fall apart during the CD era of the 90s, when every package was essentially the same, and the artwork was too small to make a strong impact. Them things went fully digital, and people could just cherry pick their favorite tracks, and the concept of an album as art collapsed.
How do you cherry pick Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall? Or The Beatles' Sgt Pepper, Abby Road, Revolver, Rubber Soul? Led Zeppelin IV? The Who's Who's Next? The Cars debut album?
Today, artists generally don't think in terms of full albums, just individual songs. It's the equivalent of a corporation only being concerned about the current quarter's results, and not considering the long term ramifications of that sort of thinking.
This is my bearing. The stuff I love most, and want to listen to most, also tends to be stuff that is so good, the entire album is good.
Huge agree. There are so many albums that tell a complete story. They take you on an emotional journey. Or you're just missing banger after banger. The only time I ever listen to a random assortment of songs is if I'm listening to music on Youtube or the radio for some reason. I almost never sit down to listen to music in a random playlist when I'm going through my collection. Don't even have Spotify installed. Years of collecting music doesn't require a Spotify account.
unless its pop
Yeah i don't know any pop albums made as a single piece of art
I don't know what you would consider Cornelius's Fantasma, I think in some regard it can be considered pop. Do yourself a favour and check that album, and do it from start to finish in one go.
I've given it a go, it sure is something haha.
Not my kinda something though but I gave it a go anyway
What about Michael Jackson, Thriller Album?
I believe that this was the reason Tool took so long to go on streaming platforms.
Problem is it can sometimes be too samey, so it just blends together after a while.
You're just describing a bad album
At my house I almost exclusively listen to records.
I put it on, listen to the whole thing and put the next one on.
Honestly, it's very hit or miss, and it's way more miss than hit for big artists... there are albums that are even conceptualized as a full art piece, but in reality the majority have lots of songs that are there because the record company said there had to be an x amount of songs, a new album every x amount of time, and sometimes would even force them to record covers... The Shape Of Punk To Come is among my earliest acquisitions and is a great album, but among my earliest acquisitions there's also Recipe for Hate, and that joke about buying an album because of one song (in this case, American Jesus) and the rest of the album sucking is true :P
I was thinking about this recently, because artists releasing music exclusively in digital formats they rarely release full albums nowadays, just tons of singles, and platforms like Discogs are having a hard time cataloguing new artists, but I guess not having to release x amount of songs together gave them more artistic freedom and they can focus on releasing what they really like and not just pushing records because of contractual clauses.
That being said, never let an algorithm pick music for you.
I got a record player and have been buying vinyl recently, so listening to whole albums is pretty much default, and it's been amazing, I agree. But that's not a necessity with the CD changer I got to stack under it, or streaming. I do love returning to real album listening, but music is a very personal thing.
Great Refused album though.
except Tool's Lateralus while on psychedelics, absolutely skip that last song.
Are you referring to Pink Floyd’s A Collection of Great Dance Songs?
That's quite an arrogant thing to say. Why do you think you have any saying in how other people consume art?
Ease up turbo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_album
Like most things out there, you are absolutely right, but you are also wrong. Art is a subjective experience which may, or may not, find collective commonalities. Also, not all albums are "art". Some "new releases" are just thrown into the music infrastructure gears, with the hopes that some dollar bills will be squeezed out of the machine.
I’m a novice musician, producer, and sometimes rapper because I can’t sing for shit but I agree.
An album is like a film to me, songs are scenes and they fit because it’s a piece of a bigger story. My favorite hip hop albums are The Cool by Lupe Fiasco and APOS by Cunninlynguists (it flips to their newer two sometimes) but I love those so much because they tell stories (they’re technically concept albums) and feel great by themselves too. So on the opposite side, it’s hard to make an album that is cohesive together and amazing individually. Not all artists are that impressive.
I hate the shortening of songs and even I have fallen to it but I feel good musicians try to make good albums and not just singles. Doesn’t even have to be a concept album. I really like Kendrick’s last two albums, prior more than latter as the beef will age the latter but flow is also important.
I can talk forever on this but it may just be a sign of the times changing art for the worst.
A couple of years back I was on the tier of music that came with Amazon Prime. One day they decided that listening to albums in order was a premium feature, and if have to pay extra for that.
I suspect Spotify never had as many subscribers sign up as they did that day.
That's such a wild choice by Amazon but it makes sense.
Here's something people want, let's charge for it
It's called "rent seeking"
Made them an easy cancel for video too, since they're the only service that has more to gain by removing titles than from adding them.
Yeah i cancelled their video because everything was for sale not in streaming
I have grown up to become that person that gets tilted by shuffle buttons (real)
Totally agree - some artists dependig on the genre, eg Katatonia (their Dead End Kings is 👌) have very nicely crafted albums.
Not every album is conceived like that. A lot of them were produced just to sell a single. I mostly listen to complete albums too, but I make sure they are quality or no-filler albums.
I always listen to album tracks in sequence, either from the start or from in inner track. love to get into the groove, I don’t think I’ve played tracks randomly for years. Obligatory fk Spotify.
Put on an Album is the only way I listen to music. As you said, it's often intended as one coherent art piece. Nothing wrong with listening to a single song. Still, it doesn't feel right to me to have a compilation of random songs.
I really enjoyed this album that includes a mini audio story, very immersive: The Loop by Volkor X
Great album you are listening to.
I feel the same way as well, I will always listen to albums / EPs and very rarely a playlist of random songs mashed together. In general I don't really care for playlists at all.
Quite often there will be one song on an album I will skip though, usually the wanky ballad on a metal album for example, and I'm OK with that. But if an album has one or two great songs and the rest is shite I just won't ever listen to those "great" songs really either.
I want the whole listening experience, not just a list of songs from all different artists.
Oh, hey, I just had this thought while listening to Rammstein yesterday
Ah nice, what album
Mutter
Vol. II by Angine de Poitrine is definitely a good example of requiring a front to back listen. Not because the songs connect per se, but the novelty never seems to die when you listen to it this way.
It's like the difference between getting one spot on your body massaged every day, and getting a head to toe massage every day. But it's my brain/ADHD being massaged.
It's not all art, especially when labels and PR folks are involved. How much say in set order or even content of an album the artists get varies.
i'm younger but i feel the same way. i almost always listen to albums exclusively, and it's probably the only thing i don't enjoy about being a community radio dj - they tell us not to even play more than a single song by the same artist in an hour.
on the one hand, people put likely hundreds of hours total into a single album, and the album as a whole is the only way to truly appreciate the entire piece of art. on the other hand, it is a small issue to feel better than other people with, lmao. & i would argue the majority of albums have at least a few songs that aren't as good.
oh and as long as we're here, since you're already using lemmy, you might be open to spotify alternatives. consider qobuz, they pay artists significantly more.
I never stopped listening to whole albums, from childhood with tapes and CDs, through the filesharing days and into streaming services.
I still let the algorithm take the wheel and auto play after the album finishes, and sometimes I use generated playlists and such, especially when I'm playing music in a group setting. But for my own listening pleasure it's full albums 95% of the time.
I still rate music in terms of albums as well. If I only like one or a few songs, it's just an ok album, even if I really like those songs.
I find that the artists who care to make coherent albums tend to be ones who make better music in general, but maybe that's just confirmation bias.
nothing beats having a wall shelf full of cds <3
Where do you even use CDs these days? Mine is stored on SSDs.
Yeah I'm spewing mine were stolen
Yes, maybe, for some.
Not many live shows (ignoring classical i guess) follow album order though and they're very rarely worse than the LP.
Jeffrey Lewis did a cool interlude recently last time he played here on how he comes up with the set list for a city - he has a massive database.
I largely agree with you here. I recently left Spotify and have been growing my locally hosted music library and instead of building my own playlists I've just been tuning into whole albums. I've found that most albums (not all, some albums seem to just be thrown together) have a flow to them and are just much more enjoyable when listened together.
A lot of modern artists just release singles, which makes it really difficult to know where to start or how they want me to discover their sound.
I don’t think there is any “proper” way to do something you enjoy so long as you enjoy it. I don’t like the idea that if you’re going to do something like listen to music that you have an obligation to it in a specific way. Art and experiencing art are both subjective acts, there may be a lot of ways to do it wrong, but there is no way to do it “right.”
I agree, but I also think they need to be composed to be listened to in that manner. But to take it even further, I think the highest expression is something which is both audio and visually captivating; a complete creation. My classic favorite of this is the Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem by Daft Punk.
A recent example of this for me: I love my computer, Ninjarachi
Have you seen Sound & Fury by Sturgill Simpson? Craziest thing is that the guy was originally a country singer.
I'll check it out.
I think both types of listening have their place. Especially when listening to music from the era when music was made with the intention of it being heard as an album in its entirety. Like literal albums is a method of playback where you are typically listening to at least a whole side of the album, you wouldnt be skipping around. CD players even you were likely to listen to more than one song of the album, just because it would require changing the CD vs letting it play.
Most music made after the proliferation of MP3s isnt really made in that same vein. Usually at most you get the “concept album” or something where an artist delves into a particular type of music. Those are still cohesive albums, but it’s also very different from something that is literally more or less one piece of music a la Dark Side of the Moon or something like that.
Most modern albums are more of a collection of songs at best, and they may not have much similarity or relevance to each other. Take the Black Keys for instance. They mostly do albums by genre that they want to try making. So the songs have a related sound, but listening to them is more like picking out whatever you like and would want to hear again. I wouldnt listen to the album straight through other than the first time I hear it. They songs aren’t connected in an important way other than being the same genre
you didn't change cds. it had many tracks. you just skip to the one you want. 8 track worked that way to but it never took off.
Yes. What I was trying to say is that MP3 players were the first media player that you could have a ton of different artists music on. Yeah there were mix tapes and mix cds but it wasnt as easy as mp3s made it to have so much music in one player. Having to physically change a cd, or an actual album, made it more likely for people to listen to larger sections of entire albums before changing artists.
Once people could have the diversity of the radio (or a giant mix tape) but with the press of a button we ended up kind of killing off the point of making a cohesive album. All attention is focused on individual tracks now more than ever. It was a slow death though that incrementally progressed alongside technology
oh duh. yeah it would only be songs from that artist and album. I get it now.
Albums for entire listening (at least for the first time). Playlists for shuffling non stop.
Nah.
Agreed. A lot of work goes into deciding track order on an album, it is part of the process. Back when ipods and mp3 players were how people carried their music around i found it stressful when i was looki at someone elses collection and it was just 1 song per artist because mine was whole albums only.
Some are, some are not. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not. But then I'm the guy who mostly just listens to vocaloid covers.
Albums always have a better side and a worse side and one gets played more than the other. Except Dark Side and maybe Sgt. Pepper.
you could have listed every Pink Floyd and every Beatles album here as exceptions
I predominantly listen to albums, and have done since the 80s. With streaming, I can even queue up an artist's entire discography and work my way through it over several days.
The exception is I'll use a discovery queue sometimes to find new artists, but when I find a track I like, I play the whole album. If I like that album, I'll listen to any others they have.