No matter how many changes, no matter what genre you love, be it rock, punk, rap, indie, or all things in between, there is no escaping the magic contained within a good album.
Yes, individual songs are great, but when an album has been well executed as a whole, it brings a whole new meaning to music. The overall theme of an album, paired with how songs line up against one another and the story that artists can tell throughout the run time of a ten-song record, contains multitudes which other art forms could only dream of.
A perfect album is one of the hardest things to come by in music, as this list proves. The truth is that while a lot of LPs might be exceptional pieces of music, they fail to land in the ‘perfect’ category thanks to certain songs completely missing the mark. It can be hard for artists to step away from the record and see that certain songs don’t fit the bill, and as a result, some of your favourite LPs are simply one song too long.
So, which of the greatest albums out there could have done with some more ruthless makers?
Two amazing albums by The Beatles are often considered too long:
1.The Beatles – ‘The White Album’
The White Album arguably saw The Beatles at their most creative, as each band member was putting forward ideas that didn’t need to be connected so long as they were good enough, and as a result, the album is pretty inconsistent in tone, but the songs are of such a high quality that it doesn’t matter.
The Beatles’ epic is a fantastic record to listen to, yes, but it’s one song too long, regardless of how much John Lennon wanted to push the boundaries of music, for ‘Revolution 9’ didn’t hit the mark.
Some hear this track and celebrate it as a work of genius, with Lennon providing his take on what he thinks music might sound like in the future, but this track was likely more of a push back on some of Paul McCartney’s more pop-oriented offerings rather than being an individual work of brilliance. Despite being a masterpiece of an LP, there is no escaping The White Album could have done without this experimental number.
2.The Beatles – ‘Rubber Soul’
Yes, The Beatles are on this list twice; I suppose when you’re writing as much as The Fab Four did, simply by the law of averages, a couple of bad songs are going to slip through the cracks.
This is what happened on their album Rubber Soul, as while the record was a great offering by The Beatles, the song ‘Run For Your Life’ was a sinister and twisted number that would have been better left on the editing floor.
It’s a song that continued to spark dissention even decades after it was released, as the dark lyrics made a lot of listeners particularly uncomfortable, to the point where in 1992, a radio station in Ottawa went banned the song, saying they had listeners complain that the line “I’d rather see you dead little girl, than to be with another man” leaned too heavily on the controversial side.
