Despite having heard hundreds of albums in my life, I have never heard a single 'perfect' album. Call this a case of semantics, or unwillingness to yield to stuff I enjoy, but to call something 'perfect' means that it's flawless, without error every single time you listen to it. That's an impossible standard, and I'm not the person to judge whether an album can actually live up to that standard.
"Perfect" is not a word that I usually use to describe music, but I think there's something wrong with using the word to mean something that can never be achieved. I think this is a broader issue with the way our culture uses the word "perfect"—it's often used to name some made-up state that is literally unachievable, which to me would make it a useless term. But we should have a word that names something like "suited completely for its purpose without drawbacks" or "making all good choices and no bad ones." I think this is achievable because I don't think that there's literally always one "perfect" choice for every scenario, but often an array of possible good choices.
That's actually how I feel about this as well, but you worded it better than I did.
On some grounds like that, I think an album can be "perfect," although I haven't thought much about what albums would be. I named Images and Words earlier as an album where I think every song is very good, but I don't know that the album is completely without drawbacks or bad choices—I'm kind of inclined to think Pull Me Under shouldn't cut off. There are other albums I'm inclined to think I could point to as having no drawbacks or bad choices, but interestingly, none of them are ones I like as well as Images and Words. (Here's one that pops to mind: Steven Wilson's The Raven That Refused to Sing.)
There are lots of albums out there where I like every song. The things is that with music, it's simply not possible to factually call something better than something else. Even answering questions like 'what is your favourite song/band/album?' is very difficult for me, because it's very dependent on when you're asking, or what I'm feeling like. Calling something your 'favourite' then, in essence, becomes rather meaningless, if you can have a new favourite thing the next day (or hour). When I did the Album top 50 thread(s) on DTF, I named
Images & Words as my #1 album and that's probably what I'll still default to, despite not listening to it for more than once every year (if at all) these days. It is an easy answer however, because it's the album that sucked me into music first and foremost. Had that been something else entirely, my tastes might have been different, or might name a different album as my #1, but who cares, really?
That's part of why I don't use "perfect" very often in talking about music. That an album involves only good elements and no bad ones is only part of what's involved in me liking it. It matters to the extent that I think it's strange to talk about an album with a song you full-on skip being your favorite ever, but if a song does one thing that I don't think is good, like Pull Me Under cutting off, that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the rest of it, and it doesn't mean the album can't be my favorite ever, so long as everything else is good enough in my eyes.
I think you can still like or even love albums, even if there are moments on an album that you don't like. In fact, whenever I'm listening to albums, there's never a song I will skip. I just don't do it. It's part of what makes something enjoyable as well; if a song/album/band doesn't have any low points (for you!), then it can't have any highs either and everything would blend together in a one-dimensional sameness. Again, that's my idea of how this stuff works, don't take that as a fact.
Topic: *Official* A View from the Top of the World discussion thread (Read 143133 times)