Once upon a time...

 

It must be something in the water. Or, not so much the water, as the Styxian river that flows through shadowy woods, as their proponents would probably have it. Wherever it is, it's definitely there. And when the biggest band in the world goes about making two of them on the trot, you know it's definitely arrived.

I'm talking about that strangest of things - the concept album. It's a tricksy beast, no doubt about it - probably a dragon, or a chimera of sorts, or at least, that's what they all were in the past. Nowadays, concept albums seem just as often to eschew fantastical fables in favour of hardcore social-realist narrative (if we're being really kind to Green Day's latest "opus"). The mystical bleatings of mythical beasts are mainly consigned to the uber-untrendy world of METAL (to be voiced in the manner of Jack Black), while the mainstream wells up with tweemo romance. But how did this happen? And more importantly, should it be allowed to continue?

Concept albums, like all ideas that are worth grasping, are difficult to define, and often even more difficult to understand. It's usually easier to say what a concept album isn't rather than what it is - i.e, your favourite band's collection of two hit singles and a load of filler with a ballad stuck on the end definitely isn't. What the genre requires is considerably more thought than that, which is why they're so often of a far greater quality than your average rock mush.

Back in the day, them real, real old days, folk music told stories in songs, and played songs through stories, the building blocks of any concept album. Woody Guthrie and his ramblin' ilk told tales of the road and of the Great Depression (feel familiar yet?), but the records were still at heart a collection of stories, rather than a coherent story themselves. However, if theme and tone is the conceptual fulcrum you want to hinge around, it's here you want to start. And remember: this land is your land, this land is my land...

Another unlikely figure associated with the rise of the concept album is 'Ol Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra. His LPs (how quaint!) like In The Wee Small Hours were carefully sculpted song cycles, all written for and particularly arranged for one album - not just a haphazard collection of any tunes that happened to be lying around the studio. Real smooth...

Of course, The Beatles, who did everything else ever, had to have their say on the concept album too. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was originally conceived as a unified record about ageing, and/or the adventures of a retired army bandsman. Either way or neither way, its ideas, its songs, and its cover, all became fairly iconic, embedding it firmly in the firmament of Swinging Sixties culture.

And where the Beatles went, other followed. Most heroically, perhaps, were The Who, who, in April 1969 released Tommy, the definitive rock opera, a supreme concept album that takes a grand, rambling, some would say almost non-sensical story, and tells it via the medium of glorious hard rock. For anyone who's only heard the pompous crash of Pinball Wizard and thought: "Well, what the dickens was all that about?", jump on in and get involved. They made a film, too. Best seen on drugs. (Warning, drugs may cause a heightened enjoyment of popular artistic mediums).

Other bands made epic efforts in the same sort of directions - The Kinks became the Village Green Preservation Society (gawd love 'em), Pink Floyd crashed through the Wall and onto the Dark Side of the Moon (not in that order but you get my drift), and David Bowie made The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders from Mars), which is just cool. Jethro Tull made Thick As A Brick that was just one single song, whilst Yes came to represent all the overblown bombast of the concept-centric prog-rock period, releasing albums like Tales From Topographic Ocean (opening track: The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn)).

'Twas not to last. Though the dark of the Eighties saw bands like Styx continuing to achieve some sort of success with their OTT albums, public taste flagged badly. Punk had struck hard in the Seventies, now post-punk and New Romanticism were mopping up the remains. The concept album seemed doomed to the lower shelves of charity shops all over the world.

Then an odd thing happened. The punks, so keen on killing off the fusty old concept record, started coming up with concepts of their own. Perhaps three chords and the truth just got a little boring for the mohicaned ones, but in the last couple of years, My Chemical Romance have marched round the world with their Black Parade (and what do you know? It's actually a fantastic, ridiculous achievement from start to finish Cancer notwithstanding), and Green Day have done it not once, but twice, with American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. Yeah, the politics are pretty playground, and the soap-opera narratives a little too contrived (it's Billie Joe Armstrong, not Balzac), but the tunes speak for themselves - and millions of people seem to be listening in.

And in the background, quirky stuff keeps on going - Neutral Milk Hotel told an incomprehensible tale of Anne Frank and two-headed boys in one of the greatest albums ever (In The Aeroplane Over The Sea), while The Decemberists have hit a zenith with my personal favourite, The Hazards of Love, a rollicking and heart-rending record full of living woods, rambunctious rakes, and innocent maids. But here's the thing - it doesn't suck. It's powerful, emotional, and despite the bluster, somehow, it's actually sincere. And that's more than you can say for a lot of albums out there at the moment.

So, it looks as though concept albums are here to stay.

And they all lived happily ever after...

 

 

THE END

Posted In Features, May 27 2009. Words - Josh