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
Oh, hey, I just had this thought while listening to Rammstein yesterday
Ah nice, what album
Mutter
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 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 rarely release 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’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.
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.
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
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
Name another Chumbawamba song, you can’t without googling.
Amnesia.
But point taken.
I can’t remember?
Bella Ciao by Chumbawumba is the definitive version as far as I am concerned. Likewise The Day The Nazi Died is pretty good too.
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
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.
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 seem Sound & Fury by Sturgill Simpson? Craziest is that the guy was originally a country singer.
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.
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 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.
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.
Mixtapes predate cds by a bit there, kid.
They do not, however, predate albums. CDs were not the inception of the album.
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?
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
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.
except Tool’s Lateralus while on psychedelics, absolutely skip that last song.
