Entertainment, Music - Air Force Times

What a concept: Artists releasing full albums

Don’t count out the concept album quite yet.

Though consumers’ shrinking budgets and attention spans have thrust the music industry into the era of single-track downloads, some top artists still embrace an expansive view of composing and recording.

Nearly a dozen performers are releasing full-fledged thematic works this year, ranging from Mastodon’s “Crack the Skye,” a progressive-rock portrait of Tsarist Russians (100,000-plus copies sold since March 24), to Wynton Marsalis’ jazz-and-poetry musings about male-female relationships on his new “He and She.”

Unified albums emerged just before World War II and reached their peaks in popularity and creativity midway through rock’s 1960s-1990s heyday. The rise of downloadable singles has hastened their decline, but breakouts still occur: Green Day’s “American Idiot” (2004), which followed a disillusioned teen through a country in crisis, sold 12 million copies worldwide and spawned five hit singles.

That showing has raised expectations for the band’s “21st Century Breakdown,” out Friday. It’s a punk opera with a cast of characters railing against religion, government and war.

“The point was to be able to take the (figurative) needle to our album, drop it in the middle and still have it sound like it’s part of the same album,” says Green Day bass player Mike Dirnt.

Drummer Tre Cool says iTunes singles have come in vogue because artists aren’t delivering the thematic goods. ”Bands are so lazy. They’ll say, ‘Gee, let’s do a song that researches (well).’ So they’ll have a few good singles, then a bunch of filler. Then they (complain) that no one buys the album. Well, make one that’s good, and people will.”

Many of his comrades are attempting just that. Among the other artists releasing conceptual works: Neil Young (car-themed “Fork in the Road”); Blur guitarist Graham Coxon (the solo acoustic disc “The Spinning Top”); The Decemberists (“The Hazards of Love” folk opera); Iggy Pop (“Preliminaires,” based on a French novel, out June 2); and Linkin Park (an unnamed project coming later this year).

Such works “convey to consumers that they can’t get the whole (artistic vision) from one track,” says “Billboard” chart analyst Keith Caulfield. “And with album sales in the Dumpster, it could be a way to get people to buy the whole album ... though I certainly don’t think artists would have made it with that in mind.

“But I don’t think it’s a backlash against the track-download marketplace, because you can go buy these tracks individually. If they really wanted to rebel, they could refuse to put the album on the download services.”