The Beatles’ landmark album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released 50 years ago last week, so not surprisingly there have been a number of articles about the anniversary in the news. I have already posted my own retrospective review of the album, so instead I want to talk about a more general question: what qualities make a great album? Obviously, there is a large degree of subjectivity involved, which is why everyone will have a different list of favorites. Nevertheless, certain albums appear with much greater frequency in such lists than others. Some of that may be just the weight of reputation (a conviction among some that that is the case with Sgt. Pepper, for example, is why, aside from often appearing at or near the top of “greatest albums of all time lists”, it has also appeared in “most overrated” lists). Nevertheless, it is clear that there are certain qualities that albums like Sgt. Pepper have that cause them to be highly rated by most music critics and fans. While everyone may have somewhat different views as to what those qualities are, I will explain what I personally find attractive in the albums that I like best.
The first and most essential quality, of course, is great songs. Of course, even on the greatest albums, not every song will be a work of genius that is likely to appear on a list of the greatest songs of all time. But on the best albums, all of the songs will generally be at least good, and most of them will be great. An example of this is the Beatles’ Revolver. Many of the songs on that album are absolute classics, and even the weakest of them are at least good. But Revolver is hardly the only example; one thing all the best albums have in common is a preponderance of excellent songs. Occasionally a great album may have a song or two that is mediocre or even bad, but on many good albums even a weak track may serve some purpose in context, even if it seems dispensable in and of itself.
This has to do with another important quality in most albums that I personally would rate as being among the best, namely variety. Even if the songs on an album are great individually, if they all sound too similar to each other the album will end up being monotonous. On most of my favorite albums, the songs have a wide range of arrangements and musical styles, and in quite a few cases the instrumentation varies as well. Revolver is again an excellent example of this – “Eleanor Rigby”, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “For No One” and “Love You To” are all completely different along with all being brilliant songs. Likewise, Queen’s A Night at the Opera covers an incredible range musically. In fact, both these bands managed to be stylistically diverse through much of their careers, and this, along with the more basic capability of writing good songs, is one of the reasons why I like pretty much every album they released. Musical variety is also a strength of many other favorite artists of mine, including Genesis, Randy Newman, Sting, the Super Furry Animals, Taiwan’s Luo Dayou and Thailand’s Carabao, to name just a few examples, and this ability to write a wide variety of songs can be seen in all these artists’ best albums. In many of these cases, having more than one songwriter or even more than one lead vocalist helps, though a talented individual songwriter like Newman can cover quite a bit of ground on their own. While there are some albums with less stylistic diversity that I still consider excellent, it’s generally the ones with more variety that I prefer.
Adding variety can also help make the occasional weak track much more palatable in context. Take the Beatles’ eponymous double album (best known as the White Album). Some have suggested that they should have narrowed it down to a single album of consisting entirely of great songs. But aside from the fact that in my opinion there are more than a single album’s worth of great or at least very good songs, one of the White Album’s greatest virtues is its sprawling stylistic diversity. Songs like “Wild Honey Pie” and “Revolution No. 9” are not exactly great songs in and of themselves, to the extent that they are even songs at all. But they both (particularly “Revolution No. 9”) add even more variety to an already incredibly diverse group of songs. To take another example, “Who Dunnit?” from Abacab is many Genesis fans’ pick as the worst track the band ever released. While it is certainly not a great song by any means, it has a bizarre tongue in cheek element of humor that in the context of the rest of the album makes it listenable and even gives it a certain attraction (it helps that it, like “Wild Honey Pie”, is short; if it were any longer its rather limited charms would not be enough to save it). Of course, tracks such as these have to be balanced out by a large number of great songs, which is fortunately the case on both the White Album and Abacab. But context can be key even for tracks that most critics and fans enjoy. Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier”, for instance, isn’t exactly a song, so it would sound odd in isolation, but in the middle of OK Computer, it serves as a sort of interlude, if a somewhat usual one.
The flip side of variety is thematic unity, or at least a certain degree of musical consistency. From the examples I’ve cited above, it should be clear that I don’t think it is necessary for an album to be a full-fledged concept album to be great. I do like many albums that could be considered concept albums, and if an artist can pull off the difficult feat of assembling a group of songs that are great individually and musically diverse and yet are tied together by some overarching concept, that can make their album even better than it would be if it only possesses the first two qualities. This is very hard to do, however. On many concept albums, some of the lyrics ended up sounding a bit forced, which can negate any advantage gained by the thematic unity. Also, it can mean that individual songs taken out of context don’t make much sense. Perhaps this is why my very favorite albums are usually not full-fledged concept albums. The Who’s Tommy, Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall are all great albums that I like very much, but none of them are my favorite albums by those artists (though admittedly I don’t own a copy of Tommy, so it’s possible that if I get one and listen to it enough, I may decide it’s better than Who’s Next, my current favorite by the Who).
What often works better is a loose concept, where the overall theme is vague enough that all sorts of songs can fit it comfortably (such as on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon), or simply tying songs together musically, as was done on the Beatles’ Abbey Road, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or several of Queen’s early albums, as well as on Dark Side. Sometimes the concept will be so loose as to be virtually non-existent, as is arguably the case with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band itself. John Lennon was fond of pointing out that his songs on the album had nothing to do with Paul McCartney’s Lonely Hearts Club Band concept, and in truth even many of Paul’s own songs don’t have any obvious connection to it. But just by tying together the first two songs and reprising the title track near the end, just enough of a feeling of unity was created to make the album seem like a single unified work. Indeed, the trick of reprising an early track near or at the end often helps create a feeling of thematic unity, as when Queen ended A Day at the Races with the same Brian May guitar instrumental piece as they used to begin it, or when Genesis reprised elements of the opening tracks of Duke in the mostly instrumental ending to the album. In any case, while I personally tend to value variety more highly than thematic unity, it helps to make the album feel like something more than a random collection of songs.
Another issue is length. Revolver and Sail Away are quite short, but perhaps because they each still have a lot of songs they don’t seem as short as they are. However, anything shorter than Sail Away, which is barely over 30 minutes, would almost certainly feel unsatisfyingly brief – even Sail Away itself might be improved by adding another song or two. At the other end of the spectrum, there are quite a few excellent double albums; aside from the ones mentioned previously (the White Album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The Wall and Tommy), other examples include Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. However, even the best of artists have difficulty writing that much good material, so the best single albums are generally more consistently good than the best double albums.
A final consideration, but one that is largely independent of subjective personal taste, is how influential the album was. If I was making a list of my own picks as the greatest albums of all time, I would certainly take the albums’ impact into consideration, so that one that had a major influence on later music would rank higher than one that I personally enjoyed listen to as much but which didn't have as much impact on the course of music history. In other words, my list of the greatest albums would differ somewhat from my list of personal favorites, though of course there would still be a great deal of overlap, and I would not include albums I don’t particularly enjoy listening to on any but a very long list of “the greatest albums of all time”, no matter how influential they were.
I’ve mentioned just a small sampling of the albums I’d rate among the great ones, or as personal favorites. Others include several albums by Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous album and Rumours, Radiohead’s The Bends, and more. But what about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band itself? Yes, that one is definitely up there, even if it isn’t my absolute favorite. After all, it’s got great songs (if not quite the equal of Revolver), plenty of variety, and a loose concept tying it together. Part of its reputation is due to the last consideration I mentioned, namely that it was incredibly influential, indeed one of the most influential albums ever. But even considered independent of its impact, it certainly qualifies as a great album, if only one of many.
