:smack:
I forgot to mention: you shoulda gobsmacked 'em with Tres Brujas.
A fairly new one: Sturgill Simpson’s “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth”. Great album.
PJ Harvey’s “Let England Shake” appears to be songs about WWI (or the Great War). Excellent album, in my opinion.
My favorite album, period, is Quadrophenia. It spoke to me the first time I heard it and has not lost any of its appeal almost 45 years on. In general I’m a big fan of Pete’s concept albums…even Psychoderelict.
One doesn’t have to squint very hard at all to see Lord Huron’s two studio albums, *Lonesome Dreams *(2012) and *Strange Trails *(2015), as conceptual.
On a slightly older (and less heavy) note, there’s also Queensryche’s masterpiece “Operation Mindcrime” and also WASP’s “The Crimson Idol.”
Operation Mindcrime is still one of my favorite albums - great from start to finish.
We should also not forget last year’s The Astonishing by Dream Theater, not to mention their excellent Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From A Memory from 1999.
Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral is my favorite album of all time and it is a concept album.
Perhaps little heralded but a favourite of mine is “Jordan: The Comeback” By Prefab Sprout. Perhaps not as much a cohesive whole of some of those already mentioned but beautiful, weird and ambitious.
Has anyone here besides me heard Godley and Creme’s Consequences? It’s a wonderful mess of an album with the classic (?) line spoken by Peter Cook, “It’s not a good omen when your goldfish commits suicide.”
‘A grand don’t come for free’ by The Streets is a 2004 garage concept album. It belongs to the genre hip hopera!
Good call, I love that album “Dry your Eyes” and “could well be in” are classics.
You may well be right, I frankly never saw it that way and was never quite clear what the difference between a rock “opera” or a mere concept album with a story-arc was. But then, I don’t know one single opera plot, because well, I don’t understand the singers at all, no matter if they sing in German or English (my two languages) or Italian, it’s all Greek to me ;). And I was never interested enough to read plot synopses, opera’s just not my cuppa. But I see the similarity in Tommy’s score with the musical pomposity of opera, so I can understand that Townshend wanted to go for an opera style libretto too, and if as you say implausibility is a key characteristic, then he succeeded.
Judas Priest recorded Nostradamus about 10 years ago.
in my experience, I don’t like concept albums because any time a band I like has done one, it’s sucked.
I have to say you definitely don’t see a lot of concept albums like you had during the golden age of prog rock and heavy metal. Albums like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Rush’s 2112, Queensryche’s Operation Mindcrime, The Who’s Tommy, The Beatles Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Clubs Band, so on and so forth
But Green Day’s American Idiot, Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs and many of the others on that list are fantastic concept albums as well.
That was a rock station at one time? Back in the late 1980s, it was a wacko right-wing Christian station that I could get in the late evenings all the way up in Iowa, where I worked second shift as a data entry operator. There was one really insane guy that I used to listen to because he was strange enough to be entertaining.
This sounds like a commemoration of an event resembling what could best be described as the WKRP format change in reverse.
I nominate Wish You Were Here as the best.
Okay, I know I’m gonna get some good-natured flak for this…but my favorite concept album is “Tales From Topographic Oceans” by Yes. Pretentious, sure, and over-hyped in its time, but it has aged well.
For a more recent, and perhaps more palatable example, I give you “Felicite Thos” by Magma (the French prog band, not the Polish club duo!). Melodic and interesting, and only 30 minutes long. There’s no rule that you have to use all the space available on a CD…
It’s a great album. It’s a concept album? Huh. What makes it one?