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Concept Album: Concept Albums
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Black Tape for a Blue Girl is the hallmark group in the darkwave movement and from this leadership position they present a beautiful concept album of mysterious minimalism and vocal beauty. The great vocals come from new singer Elysabeth Grant, long part of the Projekt fold. The ideas come from a fusion of the artwork of Marcel Duchamp and the writings of Franz Kafka. Besides reaching, and successfully reaching, thematically, this is the most instrumentally dense of the Black Tape for a Blue Girl albums. The substrate is still Sam Rosenthal's layered electronics and piano. Beside Grant, additional vocalists telling the tale of Prague's tragic 1914 scavenger bride include Audra's Bret Helm and Spahn Ranch's Athan Maroulis.
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Concept albums are considered de rigueur in the progressive rock genre of the 1970s, hence the name of the genre itself. Few "prog" bands reaped a lasting commercial or critical legacy from their albums' thematic storylines, mainly because they involved fantasy elements. This was the case, for example, with the German band Triumvirat which released an album called Spartacus based on the story of the Roman gladiator. Although the album is considered by some to be a classic example of a prog rock concept album, the band enjoyed only limited success. Most notably, Pink Floyd recast itself from its 1960s guise as a quirky psychedelic band into a commercial mega-success with its classic series of concept albums, beginning with The Dark Side of the Moon from 1973, followed by Wish You Were Here, Animals, the rock opera The Wall, and The Final Cut, with Roger Waters behind the themes and storylines. Yes ... put out various concept albums during the 70's, most notably Tales from Topographic Oceans, which would become a defining album of prog rock but whose critical backlash would lead to the genre's decline and the rise of punk rock.
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Freed from the traditional senior year rigmarole of finals and proms, Hull delved deep into creating the characters and stories that were to make up an ambitious concept album that was to be Manchester Orchestra's debut. But as time passed and the band's line-up began to solidify, the tenor of Hull's songwriting began to change. Emboldened by longtime friend, and band-mate Jonathan Corley (bass) and the addition of Jeremiah Edmond (drums) into the group, Manchester Orchestra's musicianship began to take new flight. It soon became clear that this was the sound of a different band. Not content with forsaking all of their hard work, the revitalized group decided to pare the album down to an EP (the tellingly titled You Brainstorm, I Brainstorm, But Brilliance Needs A Good Editor ) on the band's own label, Favorite Gentlemen, and get out on the road. According to Hull the decision to champion chemistry over concept was easily made.
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A lot of bands at certain points in their career will release a double album of sorts, most of them live albums, but a good portion of them are concept albums. Now, concept albums are usually a mixed bag. Some of the concepts presented work well and are easy to understand (albums like Scenes from a Memory from Dream Theater and The Who's Quadrophenia) and some are just downright dense and most of all contrived (Pain of Salvation's BE comes to mind first, and IQ's Subterranea has a pretty cryptic subject as well). This album, Spock's Beard's last album to feature Neal Morse, lies gently between the two categories. While the concept is easy to understand, the story is just a bit too prolonged and could have been a single disc affair, instead we are dragged through nearly two hours of a story about an albino man who gains notoriety as a prophet of sorts. Still, though, there are plenty of good moments on the album and some moments of pure brilliance to back them up.
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As with most art, Pink Floyd's concept album is a combination of imagination and the author's personal life. The album's germinated during the band's 1977 "Animals" tour when frontman Roger Waters, growing disillusioned with stardom and the godlike status that fans grant to simple rock stars, became disenchanted with the seemingly mindless audience and spit in the face of a concert-goer. Drawing on these feelings of adult alienation as well as the those springing from the loss of his own father during World War II, Waters began to flesh out the fictional character of Pink. The band's first frontman, Syd Barret, and the wild stories surrounding his drugged-out escapades and subsequent withdrawal from the world provided Waters with further inspiration for the moody rock-star Pink. The contributions of bandmates David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright, provided the final brush strokes for Pink, a contemporary anti-hero, a modern everyman struggling to find, or arguably lose, self and meaning in a century fragmented by war.
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Book Of Kings—ZaZa's musical adaptation of the poem "Shahnameh," written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi in the tenth century, has resulted in a highly polished concept album, complete with sound effects. The album was produced by Gary Brown, Celso Alberti and Zaza. It features ten tracks with catchy, dynamic and moving ethnic instrumentation and a vast array of stunning vocal performances. Although primarily a vocal album, the rich instrumental arrangements assist in the visualisation of the story. The album is certainly equivalent to the epic nature of the poem in its soundtrack proportions and as her previous album is best listened to beginning-to-end.
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