Concept albums, yay or nay?

What do you think of concept albums? While there are several i love (favorite being W.A.S.P.'s The Crimson Idol), i can take or leave the stories (the best songs on Crimson Idol work as stand-alone songs, such as Chainsaw Charlie), and i especially dont like it when they have several tracks of either narration or sound effects.

Nay. I find that most concept albums are loaded up with garbage tracks that are there to further the story. Usually these fillers tracks kill the flow of the album and I find most of the stories to be dumb and uninteresting - Nostradamus - LOL!!!

There are exceptions though - I really like The Sword's Warp Riders, but the story is very muted and all the tracks stand on their own as compositions. I don't think most people even know it's a concept album.

Yay. You don't need to pay attention to the story, if you don't want to. It's up to you. But it's an option for when you're bored.

Has nothing to do with the quality of said recording. Good albums are still good albums, and bad ones bad. Concept alone doesn't save a bad album, nor ruin a good one.

If done well I say Yay one of my favorite albums is a concept album (The Wall) I seldom tire of listening to it

Yay! Cause ZILTOID!!



To be honest, it depends on the concept, and the album.

A lot of factors involved.  Some concept albums are brilliant, some are just there to hide the fact the band didn't have enough songs together.  

I like concept albums that aren't directly tied to a narrative, I call these "musical concept" albums or "thematic concept" albums.  Something like Dave Brubeck's Time Out where each song is written in a different/unusual time signature.  Or Miles Davis' Kind of Blue where each song is built off a particular modal scale.  

Steven Wilson's "Raven That Refused To Sing" album was kind of a combination.  Each song is based off a short ghost story, so it's not a continuous story, it's a "theme".  Musically the songs focus on varying progressive rock styles of the 1970s.  

There are very few metal concept albums that work, but there are several progressive rock concept albums I dearly love. I think the most recent Steven Wilson album Hand Cannot Erase is one of the best, most satisfying conceptual rock albums I've ever heard.

If done right.....absolutely.

Oh yah. Concept records rule. Grave Digger for example. Sabayon -- Carolus Rex is a great example

Yay- I usually listen to albums in their entirety despite whether its a concept or not, if an album is written as a concept though that gives me more of an incentive to sit thru the whole thing and sometimes I would argue it makes for a more solid album.

My fav concept album is probably Streets.

Usually nay for me, unless it's Operation: Mindcrime by Queensrÿche, or Helstar's Nosferatu.

There are some good ones and some not so good ones.

My absolute favorite concept album is Operation: Mindcrime by Queensrÿche.

Yay. But I prefer more of a loose narrative than a linear story with sound effects and narration.

Stender wrote:

My fav concept album is probably Streets.

That's a good one. A non-pretentious story, where it's actually believable that the person singing it actually went through it.

Required Fields wrote:

There are some good ones and some not so good ones.

My absolute favorite concept album is Operation: Mindcrime by Queensrÿche.

A great album. But that's a case of an album being great regardless of a concept or not. Those songs by themselves are just amazing... Breaking the Silence, Eyes of a Stranger, Revolution Calling... doesn't really matter if there's a story connecting them or not, now does it? But I guess this also applies to a lot of the Streets album. Great songs make great albums. A story and a concept can maybe enhance it, but great albums are not dependent on it.

Depends on the band/album. Savatage has had some good ones, and of course Queensryche had Mindcrime, W.A.S.P. had The Crimson Idol

Usually No but there are exceptions of course. Winters Bane Heart of a Killer is awesome start to finish.

I prefer albums that don't necessarily come across as concept albums at first. Good examples would be Opeth's My Arms, Your Hearse and Still Life. They both fit the criteria, but the individual songs stand so well on their own that the overriding concept or story in each case doesn't get overwhelming. More importantly, there are no tracks that serve only to move the story along.

I do like Mindcrime (the first one) but I never listen to it straight through.

Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. II: Scenes from a Memory is an example of a concept album in which the story starts to become too dominant, in my view. When I listen to it, I get sick of hearing about the same characters and narrative threads in every song. I'm a much bigger fan of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence since that is technically just one long song, and it works well in the context of the double album on which there are other songs that are not about the same subject.


Lastly, and still related to DT, though others have done similar things, I always find it really cool when bands underscore musical rather than narrative concepts. Octavarium is a good example of this. The Wikipedia summary:

Quote :

When starting to work on what would become Octavarium, Portnoy noted that it would be their eighth studio album and that they had recently released their fifth live album, Live at Budokan. This sequence mirrored the octave on a musical keyboard: each octave contains eight naturals and five accidentals. Portnoy suggested that they use that concept for the entire album.[11] When writing, the band delegated each song a different key. Sound effects were placed between songs to connect them: for example, "The Root of All Evil", written in F, and the following track, "The Answer Lies Within", written in G, were connected by a sound effect in the key of F#. The album's lyrics and song titles featured references to this concept. Portnoy cited the titles "The Root of all Evil" (referring to the musical term "root") and "Octavarium" ("the octave of the octave") as two examples of this.

All depends. Some are really good, others are just okay. And I will agree on Operation:Mindcrime being one on, if not the, best.

I'd lean towards "nay".

I can take 'em or leave 'em honestly. Like others said already, there are some good and plenty of bad. I'm generally too dumb to follow most of them anyway.

If it's done well and the songs can stand on their own outside of the story like the ones on Operation:Mindcrime I say yay.

There are also of course concept albums that aren't split into songs but are actually just a long continuous composition. Albums like Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick and Passion Play and Nektar's Remember The Future. I love those records, basically 40 minute songs split in half to fit on an LP.

Queensryche Operation Mindcrime and all things Rush...yes!...everything else maybe? but most likely no..

yay/nay. Early Rush, Floyd, Queenryche are easy to follow along to due to straight forward storytelling lyrics. The pirate metal, power metal epics, prog metal boredom...I just do not have the patience for.

I cant believe i forgot ot mention that another fav is Bowie's Ziggy Stardust

choosemetal wrote:

Oh yah. Concept records rule. Grave Digger for example. Sabayon -- Carolus Rex is a great example

The Sabaton is probably my most recent favorite concept album.

I'm a big fan, even if they don't work. There's something you just have to love about a band with ambition - even if those ambitions don't quite come across.

There is something that few bands manage to pull off though and that's narration in concept albums. It's a "show me don't tell me" situation with the best concepts. The songs tell the story and that's probably why so many of the titles people are dropping are albums where you could separate the songs out and they'd work fine on their own. Too often, the narration is there to cover up weak songwriting or a really clumsy concept that isn't coming across.

Probably the ONLY exception for me (off the top of my head) is Genesis' "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway." Granted, if they'd had more time to fine tune things and Peter Gabriel had been more in the game, it probably would have become more coherent, but the story is a symbolism-laden mess. That said, it's a hell of a good listen as far as I'm concerned and it's so weird that it appeals in spite of its narrative failings.