A Bigger Concept

Readers familiar with received opinions in the world of what might loosely be termed rock music will be aware that concept albums are not held in high esteem; in fact they are thoroughly reviled, certainly by the hacks who imbibe and pass on those opinions, though perhaps it's a different matter for the fans who listen. I'd suggest this has been the state of play since Yes came a cropper with Tales From Topographic Oceans, an album that ended my love affair with what to that point I might have considered my favourite band. Notice that when The Who did Tommy, some years before this, the rock opera was accepted almost unanimously with open arms and bands were sort of half-expected to go for big albums stuffed with big ideas to enhance their credibility - in Britain at any rate.

So why do musicians continue to produce them? (And produce they do, even those who are generally awarded points for perceived authenticity, working largely in genres not known for welcoming 40 to 50 minute epics - Green Day, Neil Young and Elvis Costello, to cite just three. (I’d argue that Elvis's The Juliet Letters is a concept album, in case anyone's wondering why his name is there, and since he worked with The Brodsky Quartet on it, I guess it must have come in for its fair share of opprobrium from those who remember him as a sort of punk and think he should have stayed that way.)) I'd simply point out the inevitability of almost anyone who creates things moving towards a bigger canvas owing to the possibilities it affords of a wider vocabulary affording them new ways of saying possibly new things. Certainly some will come a cropper, particularly, though not exclusively, those of rather limited talents, but the whole point of making things that weren't there before is to take risks. The guys who run the labels might not like this in case it alienates the fan-base or some such nonsense, and the hacks don't like it because it threatens received opinions and they don’t have a creative bone in their bodies so they don't get it, but my guess is that those who like the music for its own sake are more than happy to hear those who make it stretch out a little.

Listening to The Decemberists's brilliant The Hazards Of Love has been making me think along these lines. Today was the first time that I've sat with the lyrics and followed the action of the album song by song - the last three times I've listened to it has been in the car and it's not been advisable to take my eyes so dramatically off the road. I can't honestly say that the concept behind the album completely works. I didn't get the story, for example, and that's quite a drawback since the story, I assume, is central to the enterprise and intended to add another layer of depth and meaning. I didn't find myself particularly moved by any of the songs in terms of their place in the greater narrative, which in the case of this kind of concept album is meant to happen, I think. But I did appreciate the use of recurrent motifs to link the songs and the idea of song-types, or at a lesser level, themes to represent distinct characters. And I was moved by individual songs simply in terms of their own qualities. So if the need to create something like a rock opera fueled the band's desire to create such wonderful music it's more than okay by me.