It has become more clear to me recently that I’m in a pretty vast minority with regard to how I use music streaming platforms. I have never used Pandora, nor am I a Spotify listener. I reluctantly began using Apple Music because I have been a Mac user for a couple decades and when the CD started becoming (relatively) obsolete, I uploaded everything to iTunes, and Apple Music was the next logical step for me (my iTunes library was automatically uploaded; some 400+ albums at the time). I looked at it as a tool, or a means to an end… $10 a month and access to a fairly vast library of music, both new and old. I never considered using it as a ‘radio’ or having it generate playlists for me. I guess that makes me a dinosaur but based on much of the feedback I’m hearing from longtime users, I may have dodged a psychological bullet. I’m hearing folks compare their experience to desensitization, dumbing down, feeling lost and out of context.
I do believe that there are some artists that create or have created albums whose songs can be cherry picked without missing a larger picture, but the older I get the more I think that this is by far the exception. Even if an artist didn’t have a solid theme or concept at the time of recording, there’s always a forensic approach to listening that can uncover themes that weren’t necessarily obvious or intentional from the beginning. Much like song lyrics that take on different meanings to the artist through time, a collection of songs can hit differently over and over as time passes.
In early 2024, Robber Robber, a post-punk noise rock band out of Burlington began releasing singles off of their upcoming (July’24) album, Wild Guess. Each of the songs was in its own right a mini masterpiece, in my opinion. They have a really fresh experimental sound that was right up my alley. The full album came out online on the day of their release party show at Foam Brewers, and I listened to it probably five or six times on the four hour drive from Rhode Island up to Vermont. Hearing the songs in the context of the full album put an entirely new spin on everything for me. The atmospheric, droning Seven Houses, juxtaposed with the hard hitting Mouth, followed up by the plodding, methodical march of Backup Plan, and Dial Tone up against Sea or War gave what I thought were already fully three-dimensional pieces yet another dimension.
Another 2024 release, Lily Seabird’s Alas,, simply cannot be completely understood without listening to the whole album. It’s a long, winding road that you might think is one thing, that once you get immersed in, you’ll find is something far more complex and nuanced.
These are just two recent albums that are great examples of the benefit of this experiential approach to listening, but I’d venture to say that most albums should be considered this way. With the rise of streaming services, playlists and sponsored content, artists’ works are being separated from their motherships and trotted out in endless parades of songs that become a droning brew of “Songs you might like,” tacked together end-to-end and unspooling through your speakers like a loose ball of yarn. I don’t think this is altogether bad, as I’m sure the listener is constantly exposed to new music when listening this way. It just seems to me (and this has been verified by dozens and dozens of friends and fellow music fans) that this approach inevitably leads to overexposure and tuning out what should actually be something new and fresh. It could just be my OCD but the lack of context drives me nuts. If I hear a new sounding band I’m like, “who is this/when is it from, and consequently, how was it informed?” I guess I just need answers to these questions so that I know what I’m listening to and how to refer to it in the bigger picture.
A few other great examples of bands/albums that absolutely must be heard end to end are Abbey Road, Jeff Buckley’s Grace, anything by Sonic Youth or Stereolab, Velvet Underground, Ty Segall and Pink Floyd, etc. I could go on but I’ll leave that for you in the comments section. What’s your favorite album front-to-back?
I'm with you. Abbey Road is right up there. There are so many. Person Pitch by Panda Bear. Anything by Joanna Newsom. Return to Cookie Mountain. Enter the Wu-Tang. So many.