8 Great Albums That Are Incredibly Top Heavy With Their Best Songs
Albums that hooked you instantly... Then let you down.
How to layer an album's tracklist is a dying art.
Allowing the songs to flow into one another and take the listeners on a journey through multiple emotions is an experience like no other when done correctly. To have a high-tempo intense song crash into a slow ballad simply causes a jarring tonal shift that can upset your listening pleasure.
With the advent of streaming services, however, there is not much call for people to sit down and listen to an album from beginning to end when they can simply choose the songs they want to listen to and avoid the rest. Spotify's viewing figures for individual songs also clue people into what songs are popular and which are seemingly not worth their time.
With the fast-paced nature of how we take in media today, artists seem scared of losing an audience's attention, and so must pump out as many big hits as possible or risk falling behind and losing potential fans.
Bothering to place them in a cohesive order seemingly isn't worth it. Due to this, the need to front-load an album with all it's best songs without thought for how they go together is becoming more commonplace. Attempting to trick the listener into thinking the entire album will be this way without losing their interest in the process.
The following are 8 albums guilty of this practice. Not always for the reasons above, but for hooking the audience in with its best work only to fade out with the scraps.
8. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
MGMT has had a very strange journey, and the psychedelic Connecticut band has gone through various sounds since bursting onto the scene in 2007 with 'Oracular Spectacular' that made them an instant staple of any party for the next millennia.
The first half of the album is 5 of the smoothest, catchiest feel-good party bangers of all time. It was impossible to escape 'Kids' back in the late 2000's, but 'Time to Pretend' and 'Electric Feel' are just as flawless with them all finding that perfect balance for a bouncy earworm that gets stuck in your brain, but never in an annoying way like a tune such as Eiffel 65's 'I'm Blue' would.
'The Youth' showed they could keep the feel-good atmosphere and memorable beats at a slower tempo too and while 'Weekend Wars' is not as highly praised as the others, it is still a brilliant, bouncy ditty.
Then the last 5 songs on the album swan dive in sound and quality to the point it feels like a different band did the entire second half. Instead of the fantastically distinct and fun songs before them, we get 20 minutes of boring and unmemorable psychedelic sludge dropped on us.
The songs are not completely terrible with 'Of Moons, Birds & Monsters' having its moments to shine, but considering the incredible roaring impression the opening 5 tracks give, it's a shame the album goes out with such a dull, drawn-out whisper.