NYR407, creditting Sinatra with the first CA is not just flip speculation on my part. It is frequently stated by musicologists commenting on Frank’s career. Just one of those references (the easiest for me to dig out) is given in an article from Nov/Dec 2002 American Heritage Magazine by David Lehman:
"… On the Capitol label he teamed up with [Nelson] Riddle to make the greatest albums of his career. With Riddle he created the first “concept” album, and possibly the greatest, “In the Wee Small Hours” (1955). All the songs share a somber mood, sweet though in sadness: Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” Harold Arlen’s “Last Night When We Were Young,” Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and a trio of terrific Rodgers and Hart songs, “Glad to be Unhappy,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” and “Dancing on the Ceiling.”… "
Opeth’s My Arms Your Hearse and Still lIfe. Also King Diamond’s Abigail and Voodoo. One of the Amorphis disks but I forget which one. Bruce Dickinson’s The Chemical Wedding & Ulver’s Themes from William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Holy shit, I forgot about King Diamond. You left out Them, Conspiracy, The Eye, House of God…well, all of them, really.
Funny you mentioned Chemical Wedding. Another fan bitched me out over calling it a “concept album”, for the reasons described in my previous post. It’s definitely a “theme” album, though, with all songs based on the works of William Blake, but there’s no specific narrative stringing the songs together. Still, it’s much closer to a true concept album than some others mentioned in this thread…
Ooh, ooh, thought of another one: Blue Oyster Cult’sImaginos. Very specific narrative, albeit non-linear.
Only slightly off topic I hope … How come the absolute best concept album of all time, Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, never made it big in the US ?
I was having a conversation with a friend - call him ‘M’ - the other day and he said he’d never heard of it. I was astounded and told another friend that ‘M’ had never heard of it … ha ha ha … and he had never heard of it either.
I had just assumed that it was one of those albums that EVERYONE owned - everyone my age in the UK owns it anyway.
Stuyguy, I wasn’t saying you were making a flip statement just that I never heard of such a reference before. Now I know why. In the broadest sense of the term I guess you can call that a concept album. However IMHO, I don’t think taking a collection of songs that other people wrote and re-recording them yourself should qualify. Those songs were never intended to be a complete work to be listened to together. Granted the idea of putting them together on an album to make them appear as though they are does not sound like an easy task. I still don’t think it qualifies in my book. As always, YMMV.
Kevlaw, who is Jeff Wayne? And how old are you? I never heard of him either.
I am 36. I have never heard of Jeff Wayne either - apart from the War of the Worlds.
WotW is a kind of Rock Opera re-telling of the HG Wells story, narrated by Richard Burton with the parts sung by british rock luminaries of the day like David Essex and Phil Lynott.
IIRC it was released in the US in the early 90s (about 20 years after it’s orginal release) but didn’t make much of a splash.
Anyway, I don’t see why a “concept album” has to have a single, pervasive narrative throughout the album in order to qualify as one. “Concept album” implies that the tracks on the album follow a single theme (i.e. concept); whether or not there’s a narrative tying everything together doesn’t strike me as being all that relevant. I personally wouldn’t call Close to the Edge a concept album, but I would certainly call Tales from Topographic Oceans one.
That’s from the midseventies, isn’t it? I thought Peter Gabriel was with them longer. I’ve been meaning to track that one down, since the guys at the Jethro Tull site consider it almost complementary to A Passion Play in some ways.
It’s from 1974, to be exact. Gabriel was with Genesis from the start in '67 until the end of the Lamb tour in '75, so that’s still eight years at the helm.
