Music

TRENDSPOTTING: Rise of the Planet of the Concept Record

by Richard Trapunski

A funny thing is happening to the album format. Hip, young Pitchfork-friendly bands are writing song suites about the Civil War, edgy genre-hopping singers are building recurring themes and echoing them with reprises, gravel-voiced hardcore singers are even barking about unreliable narrators. Concept albums have not only become respectable again; they’ve become downright cool.

After a certain point in the 1970s, the concept album, and especially the rock opera, came to represent an antiquated musical form, a bastion of an earlier era of rockstar excess and grandscale arena rock cheese, when a band’s worth was measured not by the strength of their hooks but by the size of their inflatable pigs; a time when an artist’s album wasn’t taken seriously unless they had a suitably outlandish backstory: an Orwellian animal mythology or something vague about cross-dressing musicians from outer space.

In many ways, punk arose in opposition to that mentality, transforming the prevailing principle from grandeur into populism. Led by groups like the Ramones, the idea arose that all you needed to start a band was a few instruments and a rudimentary idea of how to play them. That DIY mentality informed hardcore, which led to college rock, alternative and finally indie rock, the current genre description given to anything that isn’t on the Billboard charts (and recently, a lot that is).

It’s no surprise, then, that the last the last couple of decades have been largely bereft of high-concept suites, especially outside of the so-called “mainstream”. There were a few exceptions – The Flaming Lips and Nine Inch Nails among them – but mostly concept album form has been relegated to metalheads and prog holdovers.

That is, until recently. Genres that once viewed the format as pure anathema are warming to its allure. Suddenly, a band like Titus Andronicus, known for meat and potatoes Springsteen-inflected punk, can release a bloated beast of a concept album about the Civil War (The Monitor) without anybody blinking an eye. And a hardcore band like Fucked Up, a group that bleeds DIY, can release a sprawling, metafictional Thornton Wilder-inspired punk opera like David Comes To Life and be celebrated in every major music publication known to man. Even Arcade Fire, a group that once heralded as the saviours of indie rock, have found arena success on the back of their ennui-themed opus, The Suburbs.

Even hip hop and R&B, two very single-based genres, have gotten in on the fun. Janelle Monae had the audacity to not only use the rock opera format (to craft a Bowie-esque narrative about futuristic robots, no less) but to release it as her double-pronged debut, The ArchAndroid. And the Roots, Philly’s once-underground hip hop heroes, have hinted that their next record will be a full-fledged, orchestral narrative.

It’s hard to imagine so many decidedly hip acts bordering on that side of corny. So what’s changed to make it suddenly okay to “go there” again?

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that its resurgence coincides with the re-popularization of another once-presumed out-fashioned format: the vinyl record. iTunes singles and shuffle playlists have become the popular mode of listenership, but vinyl is well on its way to displacing the CD as its primary opponent. An album like David Comes to Life or The Suburbs practically forces you to listen all at once. Adding a conceptual thread doesn’t battle disposability on its own, but it certainly adds a weightiness an act won’t likely get otherwise.

In the era of ironic detachment, it may be also be a way for bands to keep their shields up while engaging with nakedly emotion subject matter. David Comes To Life, for instance, is as much a love story as it is a tale about 1970’s UK, while the Antlers’ cancer narrative on Hospice lets them get super-emotional without getting emo.

Whatever the case, the concept album is no longer relegated to the bowels of antiquity. In fact, it’s more vibrant than ever.