cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14976953
I guess I’m just Single Minded
P.S. my store is on sale!
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When I was younger I loved listening to full albums but now I kinda hate it. I make exceptions sometimes though.
Me too. What I’m about to say was before I was born, but music used to be primarily singles sold on vinyl 45s in drug stores. I’m back to that model with digital purchases.
Also, I recall in the 90s that dance music was single oriented – vinyl 12” stores for DJs and rave flyers.
This is kinda silly but what started me looking into album oriented radio and music business executives was a song by Sisters of Mercy, Doctor Jeep.
Businessmen from South Miami
Humming AOR
I mean, if you’re listening to a concept album, then you’re really missing out if you’re not listening to it end-to-end.
David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars” is this rising and falling ballad of an alien who visits earth on the eve of the apocolypse.
My Chemical Romance’s “Black Parade” builds up this soundscape of different numbers in an effort to emulate a carnival.
One of my favorite indie bands, the Protomen, have this entire track list that dramatically recreates the story behind the Megaman video game. Their sequel is this very folk-western prologue with some banger original tracks that get so much better as you move from song to song. Some songs lead directly into one another to create this rising tension that ends in a cathertic heavy metal payoff.
I’ll admit I’m a shameless fan of Progressive Rock. Maybe this holds less true in other genres.
PROTOMEN MENTIONED RAAAA
thank you rock band 4 for introducing me to them. fucking love their song the hounds
This was a real issue back when we had to buy full albums (cassettes) back in the eighties.
Sure, we look back to some epic albums from that time, but a whole lot of them were the one top forty hit and a bunch of crap filler songs. But we had to suffer through it because we’d spent eight dollars of our hard earned money on that crap. (Eight dollars back then would be over twenty dollars in today money)
It was groundbreaking when the CD listening stations came to record stores.
All this said, I love listening to full albums and was one of THOSE guys back in the nineties who would seek out things like Japanese releases that had ever so slightly different versions of songs.
there are a few albums that only had a top 40 hit but were actually good all the way through, did u ever buy one of them? or was it all just filler?
That’s a good question. I gotta ponder that for a while.
I can think of albums like Nothing’s Shocking that didn’t have any top forty hits but was good all the way through, but one hit supported by an entire good album, that’s a challenge.
steve mcqueen by prefab sprout comes to my mind. it only hit in the uk after its 3rd reissue of the single
also pocketful of kryptonite by spin doctors is solid but i think it had 2 charting singles
It’s the one hit criteria that makes it tough. I didn’t much listen to anything top forty after 1985, so I can name a bunch of great indie albums that didn’t chart. But if it was a good album that charted, it likely had several hits on it. You’ve really posed a great challenge. It may take me a week to come up with something.
i thought of another but it depends on how much you like frank zappa, but it fits to a tee for me
Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch had Zappa’s ONLY top 40 hit ever, and is also a great album. But I’m a huge Zappa fan so YMMV
Found one that’s close.
Oingo Boingo had Weird Science chart at 45 on Dead Man’s Party.
They’re admittedly an acquired taste, but if you were in southern California in the eighties, they were… How do I state this? Foundational.
dead man’s party is a great record
Zappa has always been tough for me. His stuff is so out there and so complex, you gotta actively listen to it like a hundred times before you can even scratch the surface of understanding it.
The guy was definitely a generational musical genius.
Ok. Hear me out.
Graceland.
I never could get into Paul Simon, especially after he had the gall to go steal Edie Brickell away from me. That bastard!
Found one - Skylarking by XTC. Dear God peaked at #37. No other songs charted. It’s long been one of my favorite albums.
Streetlight Manifesto is one of the few bands I go out of my way to listen to every song on every album, because they’re that good and have almost no bad songs. I can’t wait for the next album that’s supposed to drop this year.
Edit: Beast in Black too.
Literally, most people with Goyte; his music outside his one hit wonder is so fucking good. I highly recommend listening to more of his work if you haven’t.
I hate it when I find a song I really like but it’s a collab between 2 artists and neither of them have anything else that sounds similar
I’m even more mad when it’s a single song from 1 artist that is just different from their usual. Nothing else they do is similar and you’ll never get more hahah. It makes the song special but still.
Dora Jar - Did I Get It Wrong, comes to mind.
Back in the 1900s, I bought the Smash Mouth CD simply because I liked Walking On The Sun.
That was a mistake.
.
I made a closely related comment just a few days ago. Odd that it came up again so soon.
There is danger the other way as well. You hear a song, and you like it, but it turns out everything the artist does is so samey that there was no reason at all to listen to any of the rest of the album or discograsphy. 90s me can think of Live’s Throwing Copper and the collected works of Hootie & the Blowfish, and 2010s me remembers Mumford & Sons.
So true. All 3 of those are great examples too. I can barely pick out a song from any of them, but you won’t need to lol.
I loved every song featuring Remi Wolf but just could not get into her music…then like a year later it clicked and now I fuckin love Remi Wolf. I think I was too focused on the specific things I liked about her in the features and and missed out on what else she had to offer
If you haven’t listened to her live at Electric Lady album i highly recommend. The band she has is absolutely killer.
Dude that’s the EXACT set that did it for me lol
I had listened to her studio stuff and it just wasn’t hitting…but after hearing the live set, I went back and loved it all. I’m kicking myself for not seeing her live
Please forgive me for listing these but right now we’ve got:
- Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix
- Electric Landlady by Butthole Surfers
- Electric Lady by Remi Wolf
I await more references.
sad musicians noises
I always went to the album though so I think there’s still some dedicated listeners.
I find it really interesting how different people have radically different relationships with music.
You’ve got like depth first listen to everything. Listen to stuff on repeat until you know it by heart. Listen to it once and forget. Critical analysis of lyrics. Getting all the words wrong.
I tend to listen to the whole band’s discography if I like them , and if there’s only a song or two I like I don’t really stick with it
I’m with you. I’ll put albums on repeat, and it just makes sense to listen to them in discographical order. You get to follow along with their growth.
I like listening to full albums because then I can decide which songs I can listen to again later on, and which ones to actively avoid.
I listen to albums atleast 95% of the time. I only listen to separate songs when I’m looking for new stuff
I’ve heard pretty mid songs that turned out to be incredible albums and I’ve heard amazing songs where it’s the only good track. But I always try to listen to an entire album in most cases. There’s so much good music out there, just under the surface.
I always try to listen to an entire album in most cases
I just look for the Best Of album if its an older song.
I’ve done that with artists on spotify but end up not really finding anything then I try on YouTube and find a bunch, it’s hit or miss what their popular* songs are on different platforms and if I’ll like them or not
That does suck. Sometimes you just need to go to the artist’s website and see if you can download the album or buy the vinyl.
Totally. If I hear a really good song sometimes I’ll do a hyper study over a period of time listening to every album, all collabs, the collaborator’s albums, and so on. Definitely did this more when I was younger. But when I hear that sound, it’s mission time.
And the most popular songs of any band, which are generally the ones you’ll hear randomly, might not turn out to be the ones you like the most from that album or artist. I’ve had songs I liked and listened to a lot but just never got around to exploring the band until years later, and then found some of my all-time favourites after doing so.
A perfect example for me is my favourite song from one of my favourite bands, which I just never heard before actually sitting down and going through their whole discography:
And then there is the polar opposite crowd which caused Plexamp to hava a shuffle where it shuffles whole albums instead of songs.
That’s me, I love full albums.
Hey, it’s me, I have two self released albums, and two EPs. Give me a shot: www.thassodar.com
I liked Leveling Up and now I’m listening to your newest release
Off to a strong start here. Are the horns sampled, a VST, or are you playing? My biggest struggle with music is getting instruments I can’t play (horns, as an example) to sound how I’m hearing them in my head
I’m not drawing a comparison to the music itself but it reminds me of what I like about 3 artists in particular: A Cloud For Climbing, Broke For Free, and Mesita. They, and you, layer a lot of sounds in a way that pleases me.
So most of the horns are samples, for example Beaches in My Sand is all samples. Doing Things With Stuff is actually a BBC Symphonic Orchestra VST I got for free a few years ago, so I was doing things with that stuff, if you get what I mean.
Recently I’ve been incorporating my own custom sub bass, like in Smoky Whispers and Whatchudoin’ (SoundCloud).
A lot of my Jamns from January have custom sub bass, but those are 14 one minute tracks I did for a challenge.
EDIT: I forgot: Midnight Funk Train had a ton of horns, but it’s all samples. The “flute box” in the middle of the song is several flute samples I threw on a drum rack and came up with a “solo” for them.
Ok I will today
Very relatable. I have entire discographies with only about a song an album I like. It’s kinda difficult to let go of the entire rest of the album without being sure I can access it at some point in the future.
I don’t usually look up the rest of the album because when I used to do that, I almost never found even 1 more song on the album I liked. There are exceptions, of course. But there aren’t many artists that have nothing but bangers.
I still give it a try once in a while. Often it isn’t the album, but another by the band might have something enjoyable.
Pretty rare to have a whole A-side’s worth of songs that slaps these days.
EDM / techno is kind of an exception with many albums that were designed to be played from start to finish, going hard all the way.
If you like techno or funk at all check out Griz, almost all his albums can be put on and listened to straight through, especially if you’re out driving or something.
In particular Good Will Prevail and Ride Waves are almost entirely bangers with only a couple duds. Funky as fuck
This is how I feel about all bands/artists…they may have a one or two songs that I like and the rest of their discography is not something I want to listen to at all.
I feel that way about some, but certainly not all. I can’t imagine only listening to a single track from say Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd.
Meanwhile me with only Money and Another Brick in the Wall as the only Pink Floyd tracks in the whole digital library
That’s because Dark Side of the Moon is a single track 🙃
Concept albums are meant to be listened in their entirety so it makes sense. Pink Floyd is a band notorious for concept albums, but they’re not the only ones. If you’re an Arctic Monkeys fan, you’ll probably not listen to just one song from Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. In spotify which shows the number of listens per song, it shows that all songs on Tranquility Base have the same number of listens (some more than others, but not by an order of magnitude).
I guess OP was mostly talking about regular albums which are mostly just collections of disjoint songs. It’s probably happening less now that people consume music one song at a time, but there are numerous examples of artists releasing one good song and then a bunch of filling around it and pass it as an album. If you were playing a CD (or a cassette if you’re old enough), chances are you’d listen to the rest of the album anyway and eventually like it through repetition. For example, with spotify again, if I’m looking at Cowboy Carter by Beyonce, “Texas Hold’em” has 340 million listens and all the rest are below 20 thousands.
I just can’t be bothered listening to tracks I don’t like, especially in this day and age where I don’t have to swap CDs/tapes to listen to a track from a different artist.
I have this thing as well. In general I’m really picky with music, I’d say I don’t like most songs. But once in a while I find one song by some artist I like and the rest of their songs I don’t like. It’s weird.
The moment when you realize the only good song was a cover…
I’m a mix of both. That’s why I pay for Spotify, and also own a turntable setup. Sometimes I just want single tracks, sometimes I want to sit down and listen to the entire album. There are some albums where I’ll only listen to the entire thing.
