I’m just listening to my favorite Led Zeppelin album, III. Both sides are clearly different, the first side electric hard rock and blues, while the B side is acoustic folk, and both sides are great. The first example I can think of is Bob Dylan’s first electric album “Bringing It All Back Home”, with the same split on A and B side. Another great one is Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps”, this time the A side is the acoustic one while the hard rocking songs come on the B side. All these three albums happen to be masterpieces IMHO, so what have you?
Would Dog and Butterfly by Heart be along the same lines?
One side is the Dog (rock songs) and the other is the Butterfly (ballads)
Richard Thompson’s You? Me? Us? (1996) qualifies, I think, though it’s two discs.
Ben Harper’s Both Sides of the Gun does this.
Both good ones, doesn’t matter if it’s two sides or two discs.
Stretching the notion a bit, each side of Todd Rundren’s Something/Anything? has a different “theme”:
Side one: A Bouquet of Ear-catching Melodies
Side two: The Cerebral Side
Side three: The Kid Gets Heavy
Side four: Baby Needs a New Pair of Snakeskin Boots (A Pop Operetta)
Risking to hijack my own thread, in this regard Joe Jackson’s “Night And Day” has a, well, night and a day side. But it’s not a difference between electric/acoustic.
In Your Honor, the 2005 double album by Foo Fighters, fits this bill. The first disc is regular rock material typical of the band’s regular style, while the second is quieter, more introspective material on acoustic instruments.
The band even took that concept along with them on the tour they did to promote that album. They tended to play two shows on consecutive nights in each city they visited, an arena show the first night and then a theater show the second. The arena show would be a typical rock concert while the theater show focused on the acoustic songs and was more intimate.
Also a good one, I have that album but didn’t think of it for this thread.
I’m not sure how wide a net this thread is supposed to cast, but I thought of The Two Sides of The Smothers Brothers, with one side comedy and one side serious music.
Initially, I was only thinking of the electric/acoustic divide, but if you have examples for other differently styled album sides, bring 'em.
I have a variation on the concept: A 2-disk set, one disk electric, one acoustic.
Poseidon and the Bitter Bug (2009) by Indigo Girls. The acoustic disk duplicates all the songs on the electric disk, only unplugged, and it contains one more song the electric disk doesn’t have: “Salty South.”
Side one of Blue Öyster Cult’s Tyranny and Mutation is “The Black”. Side two is “The Red”
Not really what you are looking for, but side 4 of All Things Must Pass is nothing like the first 3 sides.
Way back when, Alan Ladd did a radio program on Sunday night where he’d play 7 albums in their entirety. He skipped side 4! I was pissed ‘cause I was recording the show.
Frank Sinatra’s 1980 concept album Trilogy: Past Present Future consists of three discs:
Disc 1 (“The Past”): jazz standards
Disc 2: (“The Present”): then-recent pop songs
Disc 3: (“The Future”): various experimental weirdness
George Carlin’s 1972 stand-up comedy album FM & AM has his older “clean-cut” material on one side (“AM”) and his newer countercultural material on the other (“FM”).
Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is the fifth studio album by Counting Crows.
It’s divided into two sides: the rock music of Saturday night and the more acoustic, more country-tinged Sunday morning.
On the topic of Counting Crows, their live album Across a Wire also fits. The first disc, taken from their appearance on VH1 Storytellers, starts out all-acoustic, gradually adding some electric instrumentation in the second half (which would’ve been “Side Two” if it were on vinyl), but mostly sticking with the group’s slower and softer songs.
The second disc, which was recorded at Hammerstein Ballroom for MTV’s Live at the 10 Spot, is electric and up-tempo from the beginning.
I can’t say I’ve ever listened to the entire album all the way through, so I can’t say how the stuff in the middle sounds, but Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps is similarly bookended by two different recordings of the same song - the acoustic folk number “My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” at the beginning, and the heavy proto-grunge “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” at the end.