The Museum of Albums

A gallery of the most unusual and innovative album releases of all time. These have all been chosen because there is something unique about their form, format, packaging or concept. They range from the well-known to the downright obscure. Don't mistake this for yet another 'Greatest Albums' blog, though: the music probably isn't the most important thing here. The museum is open to contributions so please contact me if you want to nominate and write an entry. Find out more about things I do at http://www.alexjeffery.com/ (Don't forget to click on the photos to access more artwork.)

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Ludo Mich/Blue Yodel/Roman Nose/Ross Parfitt/Jennifer Iker The Clurichaun’s Naked Cheat With Sour Wine / The Leprechaun’s Coins Numismatist (No Basement Is Deep Enough) Grotesque cassette release on Belgo-Serbian label No Basement Is Deep Enough. Produced in an edition of 81.  

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THE FLAMING LIPS:  "THE FLAMING LIPS AND STARDEATH AND WHITE DWARFS WITH HENRY ROLLINS AND PEACHES DOING THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON" (2009)

THE FLAMING LIPS:  "THE FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON" (2014)

That Wayne Coyne, he does like to act out his obsessions in public, like these two dedicated tributes to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.  One is a track-by-track cover of the entire album, the other a companion piece to be synced in the manner of the legendary "Dark Side of Oz" album/movie sync, already covered in this post here.

Coyne's genius is that he takes those brilliantly outlandish types ideas you dream up when you're stoned, but that seem silly when you remember them in the morning (if you remember them at all).  And he makes them happen.

Hence this being The Flaming Lips third entry in the Museum of Albums, and by far from their last.

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UNHOLY TRIFORCE:  "SANDIN' YR VAGINA"  (2010)

ABRASIVE, MOI?

Sometimes, like the Durutti Column's 'The Return of the Durutti Column' (which you can read about here), you can wear your abrasion on the outside of your sleeve to destroy the inferior music around you.

But with 'Sandin' yr Vagina' the abrasion is everywhere with emery board wrapping the cassette and sand filling it.  Then, in a perfect meeting or sound and packaging, there is the abrasive music, described as 'metal, glass and wood noise with unrelenting harsh noise walls of junk-metal and disturbing silence'.

You can listen to a excerpt from the tape here, but you may want to make sure you have some rash cream to hand.

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WILLIAM BASINSKI: SHORTWAVE MUSIC (1998/2007)

REELIN’ IN THE YEARS

The reel-to-reel (or open real) tape recording was the antecedent to the cheaper and more accessible tape cassette which arrived later. Even if you’re too young to have experienced the technology first time around, you’ll probably be familiar at least with the image of the bulky (yet cool, by today’s retro standards) machines with their Mickey-Mouse-ears spools of tape held aloft. The technology is, in fact, old enough to be called truly vintage - the earliest tape recorders started being used in the late twenties, though it wasn’t until 1958 that they began being sold for domestic use.

Unsurprisingly, they had a phase of being used to house albums, pre-recorded onto the tape, and packaged rather like a bulky vinyl box set. The advantage for the consumer was very high audio quality for the time - the kind of quality that meant reel-to-reel was the standard for recording studio masters. Improvements in Dolby noise-reduction in the vastly cheaper cassette tape spelled their doom, though, and by the early seventies they simply couldn’t compete on price and started being phased out. You can’t keep an old technology down though, and inevitably reel-to-reel is sometimes now resurrected for the limited boutique label release that’s more interesting to own than actually play.

William Basinski has always used tape as a compositional tool, creating loops from old reel-to-reel tape decks which often play against themselves to create feedback loops. His Disintegration Loops series of albums (which you can sample here) finds its sonic material from rapidly decaying old tape loops of his own earlier material. It therefore seems appropriate that his debut ‘Shortwavemusic’ was given the limited-to-101-copies reel-to-reel reissue.

For further fetishization, you may want to check out the Tape Project, which offers a subscription service reissuing classic albums by making reel-to-reel copies direct from the studio masters. The albums span jazz, classical, soul, blues and rock, but are very selective and, be warned, the reissues do not come cheap.

Also, click on the image above to see a photoset of reel-to-reel album releases old and new.

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DE LA SOUL: "3 FEET HIGH AND RISING" (1989) HITS, SKITS AND COMIC BOOKS 3 Feet High and Rising broke new ground in hip-hop on its release, becoming an instant classic and offering a lighter, more playful and colourful alternative to the hardcore politics of Public Enemy, or the rising gangsta rap genre. The playfulness extended to both a comic about the making of the album being featured in the artwork and also short comedic vignettes in between songs, commonly known in hip-hop as skits. This particular innovation is said to be a creative idea introduced to the band by their producer Prince Paul, whose preoccupation with maintaining thematic unity across an album would later lead him to make his own full-blown concept albums as a solo artist. De La Soul themselves would reuse the skit in several subsequent albums, but it was quickly taken up by other artists and absorbed into the fabric of the hip-hop album and helping to extend its form. The Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 debut 'Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)' is laced with skits and intros like the famously gruesome 'Torture' intro to M.E.T.H.O.D. M.A.N. Rappers are natural storytellers in many ways, inventively parading a kaleidoscope of characters in front of the listener, and the arrival of the skit encouraged the vaudevillian dimensions within hip-hop performance to really come to the fore.

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ALICE COOPER: "WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE" (1975-2001) ELTON JOHN: "CAPTAIN FANTASTIC" (1975-2006) EMINEM: "THE MARSHALL MATHERS LP" (2000-2013) MEAT LOAF: "BAT OUT OF HELL" (1977-2006) MIKE OLDFIELD: "TUBULAR BELLS" (1973-1999) SEQUELS, THREEQUELS AND QUADRILOGIES One tried and tested way to revive a flaccidly ageing rock career is to go back and revisit the era of your biggest popularity. This might involve hooking up for aural ex-sex with your old producer (Bowie/Tony Visconti) or simply having a fling with your original musical style (Madonna's 'Confessions on a Dancefloor' for example). For Mike Oldfield, largely forgotten by the early nineties, rather than launch a new concept to a largely disinterested public he decided to revive an old one: 'Tubular Bells', the 1973 blockbuster whose shadow he had never really escaped from under. 'Tubular Bells 2' relied on much of the musical material of the original and reminded everyone where its origins lay by recycling the iconic artwork of the original as well. The album hit number one in the UK and significantly revived his career, but the temptation to keep knocking out sequels proved too strong and by the time of the fourth version in 1999, the public seemed thoroughly bored with the idea ('Millenium Bells' failed to chart). Meat Loaf followed suit the next year with a sequel to 1977's 'Bat out of Hell', reuniting with producer Jim Steinman for the first time since the early 80s. If the Bat series means anything, it is the coming together of the two, although they fell out over Steinman's lack of involvement as a producer on number three (he was ill for a long period at the time). Alice Cooper's 1975 Welcome To My Nightmare certainly does have a story with a protagonist 'Steven', one that was continued in 'Alice Cooper Goes To Hell' the following year (although you had to wait until 2001 for an officially titled sequel). Elton John's 1975 concept album 'Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy' dealt with the relationship between himself and his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin, and the 2006 follow-up 'The Captain and the Kid' charted how their lives and working relationship had changed in the thirty years since. And then more recently there is Eminem, revisiting the site of his biggest glory, 'The Marshall Mathers LP'. Eminem loves a good sequel concept: his first three albums were named after the different personas he uses in his performance, as if each one were an act in a variety show. Albums four and five capped the show with 'Encore' and 'Curtain Call'. Then, he framed his showbiz comeback from pill-popping purgatory as 'Relapse' and 'Recovery'. In fact, hip-hop in general is rather fond of an arbitrary sequel: think Jay-Z's 'The Blueprint' series or Little Wayne's 'Tha Carter' with four volumes apiece. With Alice Cooper's continuing storyline, Mike Oldfield's continuation of musical themes or Elton John/Bernie Taupin's reexamination of their relationship, the logic of providing sequels seems pretty sound. All the others, though, leave themselves wide open to accusations of opportunistic branding of their music, making them the cherry coke of albums if you like. With pop stars increasingly branching out into fragrances and shoewear lines to maximise their earnings though, it's hardly a surprising trend and one we're likely to see a lot more of in the future (hello Justin Timberlake).

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PEARL JAM: "OFFICIAL BOOTLEGS SERIES" (2000-PRESENT) IF YOU'RE GONNA DO IT ANYWAY, WE MAY AS WELL MAKE YOU PAY FOR IT In 2000, Pearl Jam had the bright idea that if fans were going to make bootlegs of all their concerts, then the band might as well do half-decent recordings of them themselves, put them out and make some money from it. They try to record every concert and the series now runs into several hundreds. There is clearly a market for them, too - some of the releases have even sold well enough to appear in the US album chart. In fairness to Pearl Jam, they have tried to make the releases affordable as well as good quality, avoiding some of the pitfalls of the illegal bootleg market. Other artists soon cottoned on that this might be a good idea: Tori Amos also has an ongoing series now called 'Legs and Boots'. There are even now companies like Concert Live who specialize in recording concerts and pressing up the results almost as soon as the concert has finished so you can take home a CD as a souvenir.

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PSY: "PSY 6 (SIX RULES), PART 1" (2012) THE EP: GANGNAM STYLE K-Pop, even more than J-Pop, has lots of elaborate packaging with each new group seemingly trying to outdo the others with their fabulosity. I will do another feature on this somewhere down the line, but for now, let's just marvel at Psy's fishbowl container for his 6-track EP 'Psy 6 (Six Rules), Part 1' (Part 2 is due sometime this year). If you like album packaging with the surprise element of fifty Kinder Eggs at the same time, then Psy's your man. Both the package and the artwork inside are playful and GREAT and I can't wait to see what he comes up with for Part 2.

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WE'VE GOT A FUZZBOX AND WE'RE GOING TO USE IT: "RULES AND REGULATIONS EP" (1986) ETCHY AND SCRATCHY For their debut EP, shambolic girl quartet We've Got a Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use It (later just Fuzzbox) released an 12" etched disc for indie label Vindaloo. The nicest thing about it wasn't the yelpy music but the etching on the second side: lovingly hand-scratched self-portraits by the girls themselves. Not exactly the shimmering laser cut etched discs put out by Split Enz in 1980, but you could literally feel the pain of compass on plastic.

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ABBA: "ABBA GOLD" (1992) MONEY MONEY MONEY Such has been the impact of Abba Gold since its initial release in 1992 that it has become almost a franchise of its own. Released and re-released in a wide range of packages - with and without DVDs, with special 'signature' covers, 'Abba Gold' also has its own sequel ('More Abba Gold') and a range of songbooks for many different instruments. It has spawned an Abba biography with the same name, and the compilation even has Elizabeth Vincentelli's book and audiobook dedicated to examining the 'Abba Gold' phenomenon, giving it a seal of scholarly gravitas. It has been well noted that during the 1980s, you could barely give Abba LPs away to your granny, so unhip had they become. So, when the time seemed right for a reappraisal in 1992, parts of the group's history were airbrushed away to put the focus squarely on the classic music. No photos of too-tight jumpsuits or oversized t-shirts with pictures of cats on them. Just the odd photo of the band looking far more serious than most people remember them from the seventies and that iconic reverse-B logo, embellished with the small graphic crown that has become the symbol for the Gold franchise. Of course, much of the reason this particular Greatest Hits (already the second biggest seller ever in the UK) has sold quite so many copies and become a worldwide phenomenon is the musical Mamma Mia! First appearing on the London stage six years after Abba Gold's initial release, the compilation is effectively the soundtrack to the musical and the film that followed it (you really don't need Pierce 'Nightingale' Brosnan or Julie Walters versions of your favourite songs). There are other iconic Greatest Hits such as Queen's and The Eagles' that have endured along the decades, refusing to be replaced by modern updates. You have to remember though that Abba Gold's achievements have happened in a much shorter time frame and it may well go on to be the biggest of all time.

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THE WEDDING PRESENT: 'THE HIT PARADE' (1992) ASH: 'A-Z SINGLES SERIES' (2009-10) ALBUMS ANONYMOUS In 2009 Northern Irish indie band Ash made the brave announcement that from henceforth, they would no longer be recording albums, and would instead focus on singles and EPs. Putting their money where their mouths were, they immediately launched the A-Z singles series, a commitment to put out singles with at least two tracks every two weeks for a year. And the band honoured their commitment, each single duly being given a letter and colour coding, and a few videos made along the way to promote the more radio friendly songs. Limited vinyl 7" were released for each one, with downloads available for those poor sods who didn't get to the vinyl in time. At half time, a compilation album came out with the pick of the first six months' worth of songs, followed by a second volume another six months later. Accusations of 'but that's cheating, you said you wouldn't put albums out' were sensibly countered with the argument that most people would find it difficult to get hold of the songs otherwise. Though the band generated a fair amount of press around the release, many critics pointed out that Ash were hardly reinventing the wheel with their new business model. In fact, another band had done almost exactly the same thing seventeen years earlier: The Wedding Present's 'Hit Parade' was a monthly series of two-track singles put out over twelve months, number coded in bold colourful sleeves. Why, the similarities were just uncanny. Additionally, all of the Wedding Present's singles reached the UK Top 40, while not a single one of Ash's did. In fairness to Ash, though, whether out of a continuing belief in the power of a single (or just sheer pigheadedness) they have stuck to their guns, not putting out a new studio album since 2007.

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HUMAN LEAGUE: "LOVE AND DANCING" LUVLY DUBLY A remix version of their hugely popular 'Dare' album, the release was conceived to get Virgin Records (desperate to feed the hunger for more material) off the band's backs. The remix album is essentially composed of dub versions of seven of the Dare songs, with a new version of b-side Hard Times thrown in for good measure. Dubbing as a (sub)genre and studio practice evolved in Jamaica, a long way away from the UK synth pop scene. However, the techniques used in 'Love and Dancing', though the musical style is a far cry from reggae, are not so far away from the type of experiments Lee Perry was conducting during the 1970s, though as producer Martin Rushent explains, tape cut and splice had to be rigorously used to achieve the machine like effects: 'It was mixed on a board, so I had the multitrack of Dare feeding in, a Harmonizer on send one, delay lines and phasers everywhere and I'd flick it about. I'd do a section and if I liked it I'd make a tape cut and splice it in. There were thousands of edits on the master and it took forever to do.' The result was the first remix album to sell in any considerable quantities, reaching number 3 in the UK, charting for over a year and selling more than 300,000 copies. I'll be covering Lee Perry's 'Blackboard Jungle Dub' and other dub albums in future posts.

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THE DUCKWORTH LEWIS METHOD: "THE DUCKWORTH LEWIS METHOD" (2009) THE DUCKWORTH LEWIS METHOD: "STICKY WICKETS" (2013) ENOUGH! Concept albums about activities are rare, the majority sadly being about futuristic dystopias where man worships machines instead of gods (it's true, just ask any metalhead). A concept album about something as unassuming as the love of a sport has considerable charm though, and forms the whole raison-d'être for the group under the spotlight today. A side project for The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon and Pugwash's Thomas Walsh, The Duckworth Lewis Method gave them both a chance to let off musical steam and indulge their favourite hobby at the same time. They dubbed their brave new style 'cricket pop'. All twelve songs were cricket related, including a paean to Javed Miandad and another pathos-loaded song dedicated to the Nightwatchmen. In 'Jiggery Pokery' he got to indulge in all the rhymes he could think of for 'Shane Warne' before delivering a devastating final punchline. The album was unexpectedly popular with the music press and public and earned Neil Hannon his first Novello Award nomination in a long career of exemplary songwriting. What on earth convinced them that the public would want a second cricket themed album, however, is beyond me. Sure, they'd got the cricket loving audience, who they marshalled for a launch gig at Lords Cricket Grounds in London, but who else would have the patience to go through the whole rigmarole again for 'Sticky Wickets'? A dedicated Divine Comedy fan myself, I have noticed this project stretching the patience of the hardcore and I would bet a considerable amount of money against a third album of the same theme coming out.

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BECK: "GAMEBOY VARIATIONS EP" You have to hand it to Beck: when he has an idea, he really goes for it, as with Song Reader and this remix EP of chiptune/8-bit remixes of tracks from the 'Guero' album (which had its own separate remix album 'Guerolito'). Although this is only a 4-track EP, I'm including it here in the Museum of Albums because of the sheer joyousness of the packaging design, which includes a 3" Mini CD encased in a game cartridge. Several 8-bit themed videos were created around the project including this great one for 'Bad Cartridge', the 8-bit remix of 'E-Pro'. For a real playable album on NES cartridge, you'll need Alex Mauer's Vegavox, which I've written about here.

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TOM ZÉ: "JOGOS DE ARMAR" (2001) THIS IS NOT A DOUBLE CD Forgotten Troplicalista Tom Zé was famously rescued from a life of inactivity and musical obscurity by fan David Byrne, who had discovered his music by accident shopping randomly for LPs in Brazil. After Byrne released a compilation dominated by the unusual song structures of his brilliant 1976 album 'Estudando O Samba' Tom Zé found himself suddenly and unexpectedly hot in the northern hemisphere. Grateful to have been given a second chance, he wasted no time in producing new music for Byrne's Luaka Bop label and his second post-comeback record 'Jogos de Armar' contained forward-thinking innovations that perhaps no-one expected from a Brazilian artist. Included as an bonus was a second disc containing elements from the songs on the first disc. These could be used to 'faça você mesmo' (do-it-yourself) or simply gain a better understanding of how Zé composes his music. Nowadays, all kinds of artists are at this game, as for example Radiohead who launched a competition to create the best remix from song elements made available for 'Reckoner' from their 'In Rainbows' album. You can hear the results of the Radiohead competition here.

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MARIAH CAREY: "ANGEL'S ADVOCATE" (2010) THE DESPERATION OF MIMI When sales of her 2009 album 'Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel' didn't quite pan out as expected, Mariah got straight back into the studio to record a new 'remix' version of it. Here, 'remix' means the hip-hop usage of the term, where a song is remade with new collaborators, either singers or rappers. Gucci Mane, Trey Songz, R. Kelly, Mary J. Blige, The-Dream and Ludacris, Akon, K-Ci & JoJo and Westlife were among the artists lined up to contribute with a cast assembled that it was hoped would attract a broader audience for the album. Unfortunately for Mariah, the album was cancelled before release when two upfront singles releases failed to garner any enthusiasm. Proof that sometimes there is no point flogging a dead horse that never even got out of the gate. (my image above is compiled from several pieces of fan art by the way)

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ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK: “SUPERMAN II” (1980) SPLIT ENZ: “TRUE COLOURS” (1980) STYX: “PARADISE THEATRE” (1981) LASER ETCHED VINYL - BLACK RAINBOWS One of those short-lived fads in music product packaging, the laser-etched disc was one of the prettiest, and it’s rather surprising the fad didn’t last longer than about seven months. New Zealand group Split Enz were the first to arrive with an LP and a lovely etched 7” (‘One Step Ahead), though the jewel in the crown for collectors is perhaps the soundtrack to Superman II, which has the iconic Superman ‘S’ printed all around the vinyl. The method has been revived more recently by vinyl fetishist Jack White for a limited 7” of his solo single ‘Sixteen Saltines’.