Beyond Embedded: The Decemberists & the concept album revival
When The Decemberists debuted material from their newest album “The Hazards Of Love” at South by Southwest (SXSW), they played all the songs from start to finish in the same order as the record to preserve the story told through the album. “The Hazards of Love” is a concept record. It isn’t quite the The Decemberists’ first crack at making one—”The Crane Wife” also had a narrative thread, if more vague—but the new effort has them throwing their lot in with a number of other artists in recent years attempting the same thing. From My Chemical Romance to Mastadon and even Kid Cudi, concept records seem to be everywhere.
Getting an answer for who created and when the first concept album seems impossible at best. They were definitely popular during the 60s and 70s, with albums like The Who’s “Tommy” or Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon.” The trend was also supported by the fact that musicals like “Hair” included songs that were reminiscent of popular music at the time, which stopped being the case for Broadway soundtracks in decades that followed. In fact, it seems that as the two mediums became more disconnected sonically, the viability of the concept album died as well, until recently.
Many music critics and journalists say there’s been a significant rise in the number of concept albums in the last few years, with an especially high number released in 2008 and 2009. Thanks to director Michael Mayer (who was behind the 2002 Broadway production of “Spring Awakening”), the link between what’s popular on radio and musicals is even being re-established. His adaptation of Green Day’s “American Idiot,” with some additional tracks from “21st Century Breakdown” for the stage debuted at The Berkeley Repertory Theatre in September.
One big theory behind the return of the concept album is that it’s the artists’ way of dealing with the music industry’s decline. For a generation of single-track downloaders, presenting whole concepts may encourage fans to keep listening to entire albums the way the bands and artists intended. Rapper Kid Cudi, for instance, paid very close attention to the detail of his debut album and its packaging. He hoped that even if the album leaked, selling an intricate product would make audiences want to purchase the album anyway.
Of course, another idea is that history has to repeat itself eventually, and in a few years, concept albums will be on the way out again. Both theories seem likely, and if whatever eco-political endeavor Neil Young was rumored to be working on at the beginning of the year turns out to be as crazy as it sounds, that unfortunate decline might be setting in sooner rather than later.
