My favorite is Ziggy Stardust, but my favorite that hasn’t been mentioned yet is *24 Hours *by The Kleptones. It follows a man from when his alarm clock goes off at 7:00 one morning, through a workday, nightclubbing, death and/or sex, and possibly dreams, until the alarm clock goes off again the next morning.
I would say so, although I find the concept a little unifying than something like We Are The Village Green Preservation Society. Wikipedia has a decent run-down on the concept behind Sgt. Pepper’s. But the definition of a concept album is pretty loose.
One I thought of that definitely should have been on my list:
Estradasphere - Buck Fever
One of my favourites. I get to see the stage production later this year 
Si
I’m gonna say it. A Sky of Honey is a better concept side than the Ninth Wave.
Some have been named already(The Wall and Ziggy S.), but also…
Avalanches - Since I Left You
Dose-One & Boom Bip - Circle
DJ Q-Bert - Wave Twisters
Pink Floyd - Animals
The Mars Volta - Deloused in the Comatorium, Frances the Mute
TQ - They Never Saw Me Coming
Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
Pretty Things - S.F. Sorrow
and weirdly:
Slayer - Reign In Blood
Time to mention a couple of concept trilogies:
- The Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy by Gong
- The Mole trilogy by the Residents
Each is a series of three albums all telling one, admittedly rather chaotic, story. I particularly love the Radio Gnome Invisible stuff – prog/jazz/pop/space looniness.
Also, George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic released a whole string of concept albums linked by the “P-Funk Mythology”.
A couple of concept doubles:
Eloy - Planets(1981); Time To Turn(1982)
Shadow Gallery - Tyranny(1998); Room V(2005)
Or, better yet, how about concept bands - where every album is a chapter in an ongoing story?
Magma
Ayreon
I disagree because I love The Ninth Wave so much, and because there are songs on ASOH that I’m not crazy about, causing me to skip them sometimes, which is not a way to listen to a concept album. Still, A Sky of Honey is pretty great, beautiful and evocative of a summer day. The two are so very different. The Ninth Wave is full of tension and fraught with peril, very psychologically dark and complex. A Sky of Honey is the total opposite, breezy and laid back, a celebration of nature. They’re both amazing. “Sunset” and “Nocturn” are IMO two of the greatest songs Kate’s ever written.
Aside from stuff already mentioned (some of which I definitely need to check out):
Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger tells a mysterious story of the Old West. In Phases & Stages, he describes the end of a marriage. One “side of the record” is his His Story, the other side is Hers.
Anthems In Eden by Shirley Collins was originally one “side” of them old fangled record thingies. Still heartbreaking after all these years…
I can’t believe I forgot it, but Bridget Burke’s Willie Nelson suggestion reminded me.
Murder By Death - Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them
A supernatural spaghetti western. The Devil goes to a small Mexican town and gets shot, he then seeks his revenge and wages war upon the town, including turning the children into zombies; the towns people try to battle back. Hereare the lyrics, and if you scroll halfway down the lead singer breaks the story down for each song.
videos: “Until Moral Improves…”(official video), Killbot 2000(fan made)
Good stuff; the cellists is amazing.
Pink Floyd - DSOTM, Animals
Dream Theater - SFAM, Six degrees
Fear Factory - Obsolete
Opeth - My arms, your hearse
Just got home from work to see that that ‘Killbot 2000’ video had nothing to do with the song or story. I was relying on the Yahoo cache and the video reviews; that’ll teach me to link blindly. Sorry about that.
ETA: Though the album does seem to be posted along the side. Here is the first song that sets the story up(Devil in Mexico) and here’s the one with some great cello work (That Crown Doesn’t Make You a Prince).
Pressurehed was an LA-based spacerock/electronica band. In various incarnations, they’ve performed with people like Helios Creed (of Chrome fame), Nik Turner (of Hawkwind fame), Lydia Lunch, and Damo Suzuki (of Can fame). They don’t seem to have a presence on the web, but here’s a link to an audio track from one of their earlier albums.
Bill Laswell. Hashisheen. (Has music samples, albeit with the standard Amazon crappy audio quality)
Coil is/was experimental industrial. They’re an offshoot of the Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV collective. Here’s a sample from one of their more well-known albums.
Hawkwind…hmm, think of them as being vaguely like Blue Oyster Cult vs. the Grateful Dead, except way more riff-driven. Lemmy was in Hawkwind before they fired him and he started Motorhead. (The song “Motorhead” is a Hawkwind tune.) Brainstorm is a track from the Space Ritual album. Assassins of Allah is a track on the Love in Space album, though it’s not actually part of the main sequence.
Psychic TV doesn’t lend itself to conventional description. Here’s Godstar (yes, the goat is there for a good reason). The Good Vibrations track is also on the album. (ETA: Ooh! Be sure to watch the “Have Mercy/Papal Breakdance” video in the first link. It’s a great song.)
Black Sun Productions owe a lot to Coil.
Za Frumi. I’m not gonna pretend it’s great artistry, but it’s nifty.
And if I’d looked just a little more, I woulda found a couple of tracks that actually are from the main sequence. Alien I Am; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws-AQgQj2pM.
Yes, it’s ironic that Lemmy was sacked from Hawkwind for doing drugs (he used the wrong kind, amphetamines rather than psychedelics).
Space Ritual seems more like a compilation than a concept album to me.
Assassins of Allah or as it is properly known Hassan-i Sabbah first appeared on the Quark Strangeness and Charm Album in 1977.
Nice links though.
FYI in case you haven’t seen it: If you poke around on Youtube, you can find a series of clips from a documentary about Hawkwind. One of the clips has Lemmy recounting the story of how he got fired.
Realistically, yes–it’s the concert album from the tour they did after “Silver Machine” became popular. But if you look at the liner notes, they’re trying to cram the songs into a framework that’s a (laughably godawful) story about a group of starfarers coming to Earth. On a meta-level, that story is supposedly the hallucinations of a dying astronaut.
Yep; the album “Love in Space” is the concert album for the “Alien 4” tour. Aside from the “Alien 4” material, they also added a couple of older songs that fit into the aliens-visit-us frame; additionally, they also did “Assassins of Allah” and one of the better versions of “Silver Machine” I’ve heard.
I second or third or whatever Poe’s* Haunted* and The Streets’s A Grand Don’t Come for Free (and of course all The Who stuff mentioned).
I also nominate Green Day’s American Idiot. They have been my favorite pop punk band since I first heard them in 1994, and I really was surprised they had this album in them.
My Fav is The Wall, but The Elder by KISS is pretty good too.