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
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.
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…
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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
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
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.
Pretty good litmus test on whether they’re good musicians or just corporate karaoke.
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
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)
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.
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
Today I am listening to Refused, The Shape Of Punk To Come
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.
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?
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.
How very prog of you. 🤙
Some albums, yes. But not all.
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.
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.
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 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
