Album vs. Band

Depends on the artist, really. There are some bands who I'll stick by through thick and thin (good album, bad album, don't matter, etc.), whereas there are artists like, say, Traffic. I love The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, but have absolutely no desire to hear anything else by them. That one album by them is all I need or care to hear.

e.g. Beefheart.

I have Trout Mask, and a 'boxset' thingy. lots of love for them.

Other albums, I have 'decals', and 'strictly' but not fussed about playing them, much less buy any others.

pretty much everything james has said about his listening habits could well have been said by myself. perhaps i should just copy and paste the parts of his post that would be suitable for a post of my own.

(except maybe my appreciation of some areas of music is just about hearing individual songs rather than entire albums - like i switch on MTV or one of the other music channels i have to hear some cool tunes, but i'm not really worrying about the artist OR the album)

Beefheart is one of the only Artists that I feel inclined to buy more than his "best albums." I even wish I'd kept my copy of Unconditionally Guaranteed. Besides that, though, I try to isolate my favorites from an artist. I also usually prefer my favorite bands live. Setting a rule to buy everything by a group can be carried to irritating (and expensive) extremes what with all the reissues and bonus materials and expanded editions and digital remasters.

i take a mixed approach i suppose. after about 4 years of interest i have maybe 50 cds and lps of brazilian classics, of which about half are by either rogerio duprat productions of the tropicalistas or on the jobim/gilberto axis. of the rest i don't have more than 2 titles by any artist apart from deodato whose lps are simply easier to find cheap in america and make their way into my house through lassitude [i have 5 or 6 of his i guess but he's marginal braziliana anyway].

i definitely see me getting heavy into joyce, at some point, and in a brief interval picking up 5-10 more of her records. and i could certainly use a bunch of 70s jorge ben, tom ze and elis regina lps. but i am still buying, often used lps or cds, artists i am largely unfamiliar with as often as i pay through the nose for something i pretty much know will sound like what i already have.

it's the same in classic soul/funk [tons of compilations and random best ofs, and tons of records by james brown, p-funk, marvin gaye: i was antsy for several months while trying to pick the correct comp of pre-family sly stone to order, and listened to it once and filed it away], bebop, electronic composers, african guitar music, postpunk, 60s psych, krautrock, etc etc

for me the key is balance your acquisitions style. some percentage of what you listen to should be free, some of it cheap, some of it expensive. it's like reading and exercise come to think of it. not sure why but it's the least restrictive, like optimizing the intersection of those curves to get the most and best music..

OMG - buy doc at the radar station!

I guess I'm a bit mixed here. I'd have to agree that the album stands strongest for me, and I don't have collecteritis and feel any need to own everything by bands I like. In fact, there's a sort of nice feeling to only own one album by a band that oyu might end up liking more by if you go exploring, because it gives the album a nice feeling of being in the midst of unknown waters for me. It doesn't get tainted by "Oh, this is just repeat of what they did on the previous album, and they totally overdid this part in the next one". Obviously listening to music gets a lot of other baggage added, and much more so when you know the bands history and their other albums more.

That being said, I do, as you know, James, get stuck on certain bands at times. Like when I discovered Sparks, I could hardly shut up about them (still hardly can, admittedly), and was almost prepared to buy everything they've released. Thankfully that passed before I started buying 80s material though. I also own way more King Crimson recordings than I have any need for, but on the other hand I own even more Miles Davis output without feeling at all lame about it. Guess bands vs solo artists/"jazz leader" recordings is a bit of a difference here though.

Incidentally, I'm listening to Godflesh's Streetcleaner which is one of those albums I bought years ago without knowing much about the band. Since then I haven't done anything to hear more by them, and hardly know anything about the band, and I find that I don't want to either, because it will undoubtedly only detract from my experience of the music by adding all this "oh I can hear the relation to the guitarist's other band..." rubbish etc. Plus, this way I can pretend the music was made by a swarm of robot locusts.

As with others, it varies with me as well. If I look at my favourite bands from ten years ago, some of then I still idolize today regardless of their patchy moments, and with some of them I veered away after a duff or underwhelming record. And I believe there is some randomness to this, i.e. it is possible that I've "lost touch" with some bands not because they started sucking, but because I happened to get into other things. Sometimes you lose touch with friends for similar reasons, not just because you ended up hating the person. People can and do drift apart.

I'm not a hardcore collector for any one band. Besides, collecting depends a lot on career longevity. I adore Drugstore, but there's just not much out there to collect -- they've only made three albums in ten years. On the other hand, Bardo Pond are a lot farther down my list of favourite bands, but I've ended up with loads of their stuff because they've released so many side projects, CD-R albums, and so on.

As for the home listening/live shows aspect, I'm streaky. There was an 18 month period in 2001-2 where I saw a TON of shows, and then fell off the wagon abruptly and felt more like being at home with my records.

Like everyone else, I can take or leave collectionism. Generally a band must have the following factors before I'd consider rabidly buying their back catalogue:

- an interesting history (the story of the Beach Boys is as important to me as their music)

- an interesting musical history (I love hearing how a lot of bands progress, especially longer running bands - Blur, Aphex Twin, again the Beach Boys)

- trying different things (I would never buy the back catalogue of a three-chord punk band for instance, but even the Boo Radleys' bad stuff at least keeps me entertained).

Sometimes I feel I can't be a true fan of a certain band until I've sampled a large chunk of their output. Tom Waits I loved the first time I heard him, but even now with almost his entire 80s and 90s catalogue and two or three 70s releases and I've only just realised that, hey, I'm a pretty big Tom Waits fan.

Strangely, I seem to have acquired an awful lot of Venetian Snares over the last six months and I don't really consider myself a huge fan of him, more an interested bystander. I think it might be down to the bulk of his output and that he manages to fulfil at least two of the factors above, but there's always going to be a more rabid fan of the VSnares and his stuff doesn't hold my attention long enough for me to really get into him. I have about 6-7 albums by him now but I only ever give each one a quick spin if I'm in the mood.
Elsewhere there are bands I really love, among them King Crimson, Depeche Mode, Air etc, whom I only own a small chunk of their back catalogue, but of whom I also consider myself to be a big fan. This is probably on the strength of excellent albums or greatest hits packages, making me not really too bothered about getting much else by them.

I'm a song/album guy though I talk like a band guy.

Frankly I find this entire discussion rather bizarre and perplexing.

Regardless of whether your primary focus is on albums or on bands, when you find an album that you particularly like, does that not make you want to hear others like it?

OK, you can look for albums by other artists who you believe to be within the same genre or to have been "an influence on" or "influenced by" or otherwise similar for any number of different reasons; but at the end of the day aren't the most likely people to have created another album like the one that you like, going to be the same ones who made the one that you like?"

OK, you might want to do some research about which one to beg / borrow / buy / steal / download first (and maybe if everything you read says that the band in question only released the one good album, and all their others are complete dogs, you might think again); but to just try to ignore or deny what appears to me to be an obvious and basic piece of logic, strikes me as requiring either perversity or stupidity of gargantuan proportions!

Oh, Mark, Peter's right btw - buy Doc At The Radar Station!

And Safe As Milk, Clear Spot, The Spotlight Kid, Shiny Beast and Ice Cream For Crow while you're at it!

**Regardless of whether your primary focus is on albums or on bands, when you find an album that you particularly like, does that not make you want to hear others like it?**

No, not really, especially by the same artist. I've written about this before - I have a LOT of records, but there are few artists I like whose whole oeuvre I possess, or even half of their work. Partly I think most bands have a couple of great recds in them at the most -from that point on it's either a tail off in quality or more of the same. Yes, yes, there are plenty of exceptions......but not many. I know this question isn't about completeism, or even loyalty, but about something else, maybe.......attention span.

I have one Capt. Beefheart album - Safe as Milk. I love it, but I have no interest in owning another one. I have the perception that CB is not for me. I love the Fall, but I only have the first few albums. After say, 'Hex' it seemed pointless to own more when there were vast areas of music unexplored.

I'm not suggesting that just because you hear an album you like, you should necessarily and automatically be consumed by a need to acquire every single thing that artist's released Doc. - I'm certainly not denying either that there are almost inevitably diminishing returns as you explore deeper into any artist's back-catalogue, or indeed that you can just reach a point where you feel you've had enough of a particular artist, at least for now.

Funny you should mention The Fall here - I religiously bought everything they released, as they released it, up to Perverted By Language, at which point I felt it was all starting to sound the same (to me). I carried on buying the singles for a while but none of them managed to rekindle my enthusiasm, so I stopped.

Until about 5 or 6 years ago when I saw them at Reading Festival and they blew my nuts off and I came away and bought their (then) new album (The Marshall Suite) and started filling in the gaps between PBL and there whilst wondering what what the fuck had been wrong with my ears and brain when I bought C.R.E.E.P. and Cruisers Creek and failed to be moved by them (of course I do know what was wrong really - I was just completely Fall-ed out at the time!).

Since that I've been back and bought a few comp.s and a few key albums from that gap in the middle; but I very much doubt that I'll ever have the time, money or inclination to buy every single one of the individual albums.

With Captain Beefheart on the other hand, the enthusiasm has never waned. I know some of his albums are hugely inferior to others but I wouldn't want to be without even the duddiest of his duds.

Regardless of your comment being about a Beefheart album 'though, I'm puzzled as to why you would say of any album: "I love it, but I have no interest in owning another one".

You may be right in this instance "that CB is not for [you]" of course - SAM is very different to his later albums and would probably be the first one that I'd recommend you to try - but be that as it may, I'm inclined to think that you must have got the impression from somewhere (i.e. presumably the kind of research I was referring to above) which means that you were interested (or at least curious) enough at one point but have been put off the idea - which is a fine but nonethless crucial distinction.

With all that said 'though, I think Doc At The Radar Station would appeal to a totally different part of your musical palate (the '80's post-punk part, rather than the '60's part).

I hate Trout Mask. I like some of the 70's stuff that I've heard. It's just that they've never been top of the list.

I think there should be a third (or fourth, if you're counting singles/mp3s) choice here: people who love entire genres.

The spectrum would look like:
genres
bands
albums
singles

I'm somewhere in between genres and bands, though I'm trying quite hard to give up the genres as my instinctive guidelines in searching out new bands; similarly, I've been questioning my semi-completist (i.e. I do have limits to my devotion to an act in proportion to bad releases) attitude esp. in regards to certain Warp acts whose latest output have been unstaggering.

If we can tweak "genres" and instead consider "record labels", then I will proudly admit to being a label person.
On second thought, "labels" are closer to "artists" in this respect.

I like arcs. It seems bands are "on" and they create something wonderful. So it's like a hybrid of band/album but incorporating a time element as well.

I used to be into bands but now I'm into albums and singles (and the tracks I keep from albums I toss qualify as "singles").

There's another option - especially for reggae lovers - producers.

There are certainly bands that I'm a completist about: Saint Etienne, Low, the Handsome Family, etc, but some of my favorite albums are by artists who have no other work that even interests me. All I've ever been interested in getting by the The is Dusk, for example.

Hmm ... does anybody here "collect" the works of rock producers the same way a reggae fan would collect Lee Perry or Bunny Lee?

I could see someone like Kramer or Albini fitting the bill (maybe John Leckie for early 90's NME readers :) ).

Yep, it all depends. Certain performers are so idiosyncratic (Captain Beefheart) or just consistently great (Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, whoever else) that I would make a point of acquiring basically everything. (Within reason: I'm not gonna seek out dozens of bootlegs!) Then there's folks I like whose stuff kinda all sounds the same (Ramones), so I don't feel the need to acquire more than a few. And there's also groups who were only good for certain periods of time, say Black Sabbath w/Ozzy. etc..