21 Most Replayable Rock Albums Of All Time
From Van Halen to Alter Bridge by way of Boston, AC/DC and the Foo Fighters, what is the ultimately timeless rock record?
When we've all become too accustomed to putting an album on only to flick through it and listen to the songs out of order or delve into any number of the other instant-choices at our fingertips, it's hard trying to narrow down what makes something replayable in 2014. In a world where the average person has a good few hundred albums at their beck and call, what makes the cut for those bodies of work you have to experience all the way through? With each song complimenting the last and the overall trip through the piece coming across as the artist intended? It's all too easy to forget what the entire concept of an album is at all - that very notion of artists sitting down and deciding exactly where to place certain songs often gets lost amongst the need to showcase a lead single or put all the 'big-hitters' up the front. Tracks that build to certain memorable crescendos should maybe go near the start, elevating the composition of the work to a whole different place than if they came at the midpoint, and the same can be said for any minor key numbers that if too many are clumped together could completely derail the momentum necessary to feed into the second half. Then again, maybe it's the total opposite of this...and that's the beauty of it. However back to that idea of replayability, and the notion of the singles within. Is Motorhead's Ace of Spades on here because that title track has been showcased everywhere from EA Sports games to random slums in the outbacks of Texas? No. Instead we're looking at full bodies of work - the ones that may be able to stand on their own as a collection of stellar tracks, yet through the artform of music also managed to capture something about that particular band, decade or genre, among any number of other elements that make them worth your time.