Keefer Madness

Double Albums: Can Anyone Name a Non-Live/Non-Greatest Hits That Shouldn't Have Just Been One Good Single Album?

// March 25th, 2011 // Music

Sitting at work, coding away in xHTML, CSS, PHP, jQUery, etc. etc., I usually have my headphones on, blasting away. I go through a ton of music. A lot of people like to stream from Pandora, Grooveshark or even YouTube, but I prefer to go the offline route via a portion of my home library copied to my work computer’s iTunes library.

Listening to a lot of music as of late I noticed something. Most double albums have a lot of mediocre crap in them. Sure, there are plenty of greatest hits albums out there, and of course live albums can rock as a double disc, but then again, they’re just live versions of a greatest hits compilation.

Just a quick peruse through my studio albums that are double albums, and my opinion is that they all have a lot of filler. Let’s do a quick list of a few from my collection:

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness – Smashing Pumpkins
This is my best example of an artist being overindulgent, or unable/unwilling to cut some tracks from an album release. “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” “Thirty-Three,” “Zero, “1979,” among others are great tracks spread out over the two discs. Why not make this an album with these tracks along with a few more that you just want to play through every track, never contemplating hitting that “skip” button.

In Your Honor – Foo Fighters
Foo Fighters were trying to do one disc of rocking tracks, with the other more ballad-driven. I believe this is what the Smashing Pumpkins were attempting as well with Mellon Collie…, but if I’m looking for a certain mood out of my music, I have playlists for that. The artificial divide of soft and loud between the two discs is unnecessary.

Garage, Inc. – Metallica
One disc is a re-release of an out-of-print disc. The other is new covers. Why not re-release the out-of print, and make the covers disc a seperate release. This one bothers me the least of the dobule discs, but it’s all covers so sort of doesn’t count. Metallica’s Load versus ReLoad may be a better example, though released on different dates. For all intents and purposes, it’s a double disc, where the tracks on ReLoad were ones that didn’t make the cut for the first album. To me, this is better, as more time and effort was taken on the ReLoad tracks to make them worthy of release. In some ways, I think this is the way to go when artists are looking at release a double album’s worth of content.

The Fragile – nine inch nails
Unless you’re just the most hardcore NIN fans, there’s always tracks that are skip-worthy — songs that descend more into noise and ambiance, rather than music. I definitely feel The Fragile has this issue, and could have been a great single album. I’m a huge Nails fan, especially early stuff (Pretty Hate Machine, Broken and The Downward Spiral especially), but feel The Fragile ends up a little over indulgent at times.

Use Your Illusion – Guns N Roses
After seeing the fiasco of delays and ultimately content surrounding Chinese Democracy, I can see why Axl had trouble whittling down these two albums into one but it still suffers from the dilemma of what could have been an awesome album of non-stop great tracks. “You Could Be Mine,” “Don’t Cry,” (one version of this would suffice in my book), “November Rain” and lesser known tracks such as “Locomotive” and “Double Talkin’ Jive” would make one great album. Sure, the two Use Your Illusion discs were sold separately, but it’s really made to be a double album. How many people do you know that bought one, and not the other?

White Album – The Beatles
Even the Beatles’ classic White Album has a lot of stuff I could do without. Saying anything bad about the Beatles in some circles would be denoted as flame bait, but come on. “Rocky Raccoon?”

Obviously, this is all subjective. I sort of cringe as I prepare to hit the “publish” button on this article, afraid rabid fans of NIN, The Beatles, etc. are just waiting to flood me of comments about how my opinions are no good. I just wanted to share my observations about double albums in my collection. Obviously feel free to comment, but also add other examples that fall into this abyss, or to the exceptions to the rule — every rule has them. I just don’t feel I have any of those exceptions in my collection. Remember when you contribute though, that I’m talking about studio albums. There are plenty of live albums or double greatest hits albums that work, but I’m talking original recordings here. Not a compilation that spans decades or an artist’s near full body of work. I look forward to everyone’s feedback.