This. It's a fantastic album but not the easiest to listen to.
These are also my feelings towards SFAM. I love all the songs except Through Her Eyes, but to me, the concept makes it harder to get into for a fully listen and also makes it harder to listen to some of the songs on their own *glares in the general direction of Finally Free*. Whenever I do sit down and listen to it I very much enjoy it, and it's definitely in co-second place for me behind IAW and alongside 8VM and ADTOE.
I do not really like concept albums and would be happier if none existed. I don't really mind it when you have a
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son or even a
Clockwork Angels where all the songs can stand pretty much on their own both musically and lyrically (aside from the Only the Good Die Young outro on SSOASS and BU2B2 on CA, which are both very minor things). What I hate is when an album is broken up into a bunch of short little songs that really aren't much of musical compositions at all, just serving to further the plot. Basically the structure of concept albums like
The Wall and
Operation: Mindcrime bugs the hell out of me because they have all these little <2 minute pieces that are hardly even songs. This doesn't stop me from listening to them if the music is good, but it annoys me by forcing me into the mindset of a certain plot (whereas Seventh Son can be listened to without reference to the plot because Iron Maiden wisely did not include voiceovers or sections of ambient hospital noise) and makes it far less likely that I will listen to the songs outside of their albums.
Scenes From a Memory is my favorite concept album (even though it has concept-y aspects that annoy me in a way that Seventh Son and Clockwork don't) and it does have a lot of things going for it to counterbalance my annoyance with things like songs being unable to stand alone and large amounts of non-music audio in something like Finally Free. For one thing, I love the Metropolis Pt. 1 callbacks and I like that the musical concept is tied to that song, because that song is very excellent. Also, almost half of the songs by number and more than half by duration (Fatal Tragedy, Beyond This Life, Through Her Eyes, Home, The Spirit Carries On), can stand completely on their own musically because they don't have an abrupt cut off in the intro or outro (Regression, O28 and SDV all are stuck together, TMW is stuck to FT, TDOE and OLT are stuck together, and FF, while not stuck with another song, ends with like a minute thirty of plot and no music). This is good. And also, I find the story of Metropolis Pt. 2 to be very interesting and engaging, more so than most concept albums (seriously).
Anyway, this is why I find SFAM hard to listen to. It forces the story on the listener (less than many concept albums, but it still does) and it's a lot harder to get in the mood for an album that replaces a single general mood (WDADU is youthful and optimistic, BCSL is basically the mood described in the album title, etc.) with a very specific storyline, certain aspects of which the listener might like or dislike (I do dislike *spoiler* that Nicholas dies in the end because it seems to defeat the purpose of "learning about his life by living through Victoria" *end spoiler*). And, though I love the album every time I listen to it, I hear it less often than I hear the rest of the band's catalog (SDOIT is also harder than most to get through but that has more to do with length and less to do with content) because of the concept.
The thing that JLB said recently about the possibility of another concept album in the future disappoints me, because, as I think you can tell from this lengthy post, I do not like concept albums. I won't dismiss it right away, though, because I'm sure it will have good music that can hopefully be separated from the album. I fervently hope that they will do a whole WWRD thing if they make a concept album and make one that is on the CA side of the spectrum rather than the Mindcrime side.
Topic: Your Controversial Opinions on DT (Read 998775 times)
