In the last few weeks, the baroque pop troubadours the Decemberists and the metal bands Mastodon and Queensryche released albums designed to be listened to from beginning to end, each bearing intricate story lines.
Neil Young, always treading that line between goofy and genius (in this case, perhaps, more the former than the latter), has recently issued Fork in the Road, an album of songs about electric cars.
Exactly what a concept album is depends on whom you ask. The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is often considered one, but it's really more of a whimsical conceit. To the purist, a true concept album tells a single story over the course of its songs, preferably with recurring characters - a sort of unstaged musical. It's been done by rock and pop artists. Marvin Gaye got conceptual with his What's Going On.
More recently The Decemberists' The Hazards of Love, for instance, tells the story of Margaret, raped by a shape-shifting creature in a mythical forest and then kidnapped by the Rake. Her lover, William, tries to save her. It's convoluted, but it helps that different singers are assigned to different characters.
Considering that CD sales have dropped 45% since 2000 as music fans spurn albums in favour of downloaded singles, why are so many artists clamoring to release the seemingly outdated concept album?
Perhaps the concept album is too strong a temptation for ambitious songwriters to pass up. Untethered by the three- to five-minute limits of standard pop songs, it offers nearly endless storytelling possibilities.
The impressively kooky premise of Mastodon's Crack the Skye, for example, involves a physically disabled boy who travels through time back to czarist Russia and joins the underground Christian sect known as the Khlyst. Somehow, Rasputin gets involved, attempting to overthrow the czar and, oh yeah, fight the devil. Try getting all that in one song.
Queensryche has released American Soldier, an album about war told in the first person. Give the band members credit for doing their homework: They researched by interviewing veterans of World War 2, Vietnam and Iraq, making American Soldier one of the few concept albums with actual reportage.
For all the freedom it offers, though, the album is an unwieldy medium for storytelling. Narratives tend to be shaky and often incoherent. Adjectives like "pretentious" and "ham-fisted" get thrown around.
Yet some have made careers of the concept album - among them the Kinks, Alice Cooper and, more recently, Mars Volta.
Singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens might outdo them all - he plans to record 50 concept albums, each one featuring a different state. He's already made Greetings From Michigan and Illinois.
Sometimes a concept is so good that it doesn't even need to be fully realised. Liz Phair said her 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, was a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street.
It's not, really, but the idea is so clever that people still remember it that way. Often considered a product of the 1960s, the concept album originated much earlier. The earliest precursor is probably the Dust Bowl Ballads, a cycle of songs Woody Guthrie wrote about the dust storms that ravaged the Midwest in the 1930s. He released them on sets of 78rpm records in 1940, eight years before the LP was invented. (They were later collected on one album.)
The concept album came of age in the 1970s. David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars remains a classic. Pink Floyd's series of concept albums peaked with The Wall, perhaps the most fully realised concept album.
The concept album eventually fell out of favour, emerging occasionally as a career killer - a prime example being Styx's 1983 Kilroy Was Here. The song Mr. Roboto from that album has become a novelty classic, but the band never recovered from the overall goofiness of the album.
Against all odds, though, the concept album has made a comeback. The last few years have seen successful concept albums from, among others, My Chemical Romance and Green Day, whose American Idiot is being adapted for the stage.
The digital age may have depressed CD sales, but as long as rock stars continue to have outsized ambitions, the concept album should always be with us.
