The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

Two of my recent favorite albums are Leonard Cohen's Ten New Songs and Sade's Soldier Of Love. They set a mood that's bigger than any individual song.

A thread here a few months ago got me listening to Blue Oyster Cult again. I wouldn't listen to those songs individually, but as albums they're great.

But then, I've never really learned the art of the playlist. And don't even talk to me about shuffle, if you know what's good for you...

Slint- Spiderland
Kanye West- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Brian Eno- Here Come The Warm Jets
The Mountain Goats- Tallahassee (that one is like a musical novel)
Underworld- Second Toughest In The Infants
The Velvet Underground & Nico

Can't believe I forgot:

Dusty Springfield- Dusty In Memphis
Sonic Youth- Daydream Nation

Try 70% of my LP collection.

Love,
That Pretentious Music Jerk

Neutral Milk Hotel- In the Aeroplane over the Sea

Seriously, though, I could name prog albums until the MetaChat servers ran out of memory, but some non-standard albums worth a listen are:

Tubeway Army/Gary Numan - Replicas (protoelectro-prog?)
Tells the story of the coming robot revolution, but in a really neat way. The songs on the album gradually get less and less human until the last track (When the Machines Rock) is pure electronic instrumental. It's a really neat meta-arc.

And speaking of meta-arcs, the entirety of Local H's corpus constitutes sort of a multi-album story arc of a band from a small town in America that makes it big. You start out with songs about being stuck in a tiny town and being a worthless piece of shit to songs about "Rock N' Roll Professionals" (rockin for real estate! rockin for lawyers, baby!). You go from being the victim in an abusive relationship (No Problem: "You blow in to town maybe twice a year / to check on me, see if I'm still here / and you make me think that it's my idea") to being the abuser (Keep Your Girlfriend (Away from Me), about a guy who unrepentantly sleeps with groupies, regardless of whether it breaks up relationships; as he says in the song, "This is nothing to do with your girlfriend."). It's like a long artistic statement expanding on the famous Joe Walsh line: "Everybody's so different / I haven't changed."

Failure's "Fantastic Planet" also qualifies, as the entire thing is a continuous loop, with recurring themes and several "Segue" tracks. Season to Risk does something similar on their album, "The Shattering," which, like Local H's "As Good As Dead" ends on a thematically similar note to the way it starts. Not exactly a loop the way "Fantastic Planet" is, but definitely rewards the full listen-through.

I can name countless others, but my time and the universe's is limited.

PS - I've never made it all the way through this, but it's a great resource if you like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway:

The Annotated Lamb

Lou Reed - New York
CCR - Willy and the Poor Boys (it's sort of an answer album to Sgt. Pepper)
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Elvis Costello - Imperial Bedroom

Philip Glass - Einstein on the Beach

Moody Blues: On the Threshold of a Dream

I have exactly one album like this: Metallica's S&M.

I bought it after hearing "No Leaf Clover" on the radio one night while waiting in the parking lot of the Ashton 7-11 while my father was inside buying a gallon of milk. I was driving us home from volleyball practice (as was normal at that time because I was working towards getting the 40 hours I needed of supervised driving in order to get my license). I remember having to be sneaky about buying it because it had one of those 'parental warning' stickers on it and my mother refused to let me have music that had those on it. (Little did she know that I was already swearing like a sailor at that point, but that's a different fight.)

Until that point, the only music I really owned were cassettes where I would record music off the radio. I couldn't do this during the day (because most of the songs I liked were 'naughty' or whatever), so I would sneak out of my bedroom at night, plug my headphones into the stereo system that was in the living room (and has only ever been used once besides my recordings) and I would record music off the radio. (I also used to record episodes of LoveLine too.)

So back to the album in question. That album is what I think of as my 'breaking-in' album. When I got my driver's license and was able to drive alone for the first time ever--I drove and listened to the entire album with the windows down and the volume cranked. When I got my first new-to-me car? That was the first album that would be played, from beginning to end. The next new-to-me car? First album. When I got my condo? Yup, the first album I played.

Granted, I now listen to it on iRock rather than on the original CDs, but still, that album has grown with me and has been a constant in my life. I'll listen to a song here or there every so often (and "No Leaf Clover" is in the top 25 most played songs on iRock and has been since I got one in 2003/2004) but when new things are happening--that album has been there through all of them.

Sargent Pepper

(only not misspelled)

Maggie and Terre Roche - Seductive Reasoning

I've never bothered to rip the albums I have (and really enjoy) from bands like Tortoise or Mogwai or From Monument Masses and the like onto my hard drive for this reason. If I want to hear that music, I'll pop the CD into the stereo and listen to the whole album.

There are other albums that come to mind, even some hip-hop or punk titles, that work better listened straight through, but the longer, more thematic mood stuff is what springs to mind first.

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

also it seems most DJ / techno acts who release anything more than a compilation of extended 12" cuts, will take the time to artfully craft the entire into a thematic piece best listened to wholesale. Deadmau5, specifically, and Justice (generally) come to mind.

Brewer and Shipley - Weeds

If I want to hear that music, I'll pop the CD into the stereo and listen to the whole album.

I quit buying CDs when I realized that I don't actually have a stereo and was just ripping them as soon as I got them.

Tom Waits — 'Frank's Wild Years'

PS - I've never made it all the way through this, but it's a great resource if you like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway:

The Annotated Lamb

Oh, Eide... I have seen that before but not for a few years. I have read it all the way through and I will again. Thanks for the link!

Anything by Dory Previn. Seriously. They hit me until I heard them all in a row in an album. She used to d movie scores and plays, so I think that was a big factor.

John Coltrane - A Love Supreme. On occasion the local college radio station will play it while I'm listening at work, and I'll turn it off.. A Love Supreme can only be heard on vinyl, from start to finish with no interruptions save flipping the record, and maybe fetching a second cup of tea.

In an entirely different vein, the tracks of Born to Run and The Wild & The Innocent - while able to earn millions of dollars as radio singles - are better when heard as an album set.

Abbey Road!

Paul Simon's Graceland, Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm, David Bowie's Hunky Dory.