Arcade Fire’s new album, Reflektor, might grow on me yet, but as it stands right now, it’s yet another good double album that could have been a great single album. This isn’t an uncommon criticism, finding the marvelous buried in the meh, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t excellent double albums (two CDs) out there. In fact, here are 10 from the past 20 years, with two caveats: no live albums and no compilations.
Oh yeah, and no triple albums, either: there’s 69 Love Songs, and then there’s everything else.
1. Being There by Wilco
For a very brief time in history, Jay Farrar was the more successful former member of Uncle Tupelo. Son Volt’s Trace, released in 1995, is a far better, far more poignant debut than Wilco’s A.M., led by Farrar’s former-bandmate, now-rival Jeff Tweedy. The critical dominance lasted all of two years, or until Being There came out and Wilco, having left alt-country behind, began its journey to becoming one of America’s best rock bands. It’s a modest, raw presentation of Tweedy’s concise abilities as a songwriter and band leader, dipping into folk, rockabilly, power pop, psychedelia, and bluegrass. Only two members of the Being There-era Wilco remain with the band, Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt, but whenever the current-day lineup launches into “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” it still sounds great.
2. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below by Outkast
The albums on this list aren’t ranked, but if they were, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, an Outkast album in name only, split between Big Boi’s country-fried hip hop and André 3000’s a little-bit-of-everything, would be number one. It’s as essential and important as any “classic” double album ever released, with an all-time classic song (“Hey Ya,” maybe the greatest pop single of the 2000s to date) and a built-in conversation starter (André or Big Boi: who you got?). It’s one of the last I Was There the Day Of albums, having come out in 2003, when people still said sentences like, “I went to the record store and bought Speakerboxxx/The Love Below the day it came out.” Outkast never released a bad album, but Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is the best of the best.
3. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Smashing Pumpkins
Get 10 people who grew up in the 1990s together in a room, and you’ll find five people who think Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the best Pumpkins record and five who think it’s an overwrought, overextended self-serious fart of indulgence. They’re both right. Billy Corgan’s third attempt at convincing the world he’s the most important rock god there ever was and ever will be is so many things — loud, soft spoken, catchy, infuriating, boastful, humble, audacious, emotional…the list goes on and on — to so many people that it’s somehow both underrated and overrated. It’s not the masterpiece those first five want it to be, but it’s certainly not the disaster the other five say it is, either. No, Mellon Collie is somewhere in-between: it’s really good, when it could’ve been all-time great with some editing. Just don’t tell Corgan any of this. Dude’s still stroking it to that Time review.
4. The Seer by Swans
In my “best of 2012” write-up for The Seer, Swans’ 12th and best studio album, I wrote, “It’s a two-hour challenge, full of double-digit-length drones and spiritual murmurs, with an occasional acoustic respite in the form of a song that ends with ‘Use your sword/Use your voice/And destroy.’ But it’s worth the commitment.” Or better yet, to quote frontman Michael Gira, The Seer is the “culmination of every previous Swans album as well as any other music I’ve ever made, been involved in or imagined.” Yes. The album cover will haunt your dreams, too.
5. Life After Death by the Notorious B.I.G.
If you had to pick one song to sum up what commercial hip-hop sounded like in the 1990s, you could do a lot worse than “Mo Money Mo Problems,” a pop masterpiece with emotionally conflicted lyrics. It’s nowhere near Biggie’s greatest track, but it’s both substantial and pleasurable, a conflict of emotional interest that sounded (and still sounds) great on top-40 radio. That’s true of much of Life After Death, too, from the glamorous highs of “I Love the Dough” to the self-mythologizing lows of “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You).” Life After Death is a progressive movie with a beginning, middle, and an unhappy ending.
6. Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
You mean to only listen to one track from the ambient Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, maybe the eponymous album opener or the confusingly titled “Gathering Storm/Il Pleut à Mourir [+Clatters Like Worry].” An hour later, you’ve heard the whole thing. It’s impossible to listen to just one track: Lift works as a majestic whole, even as it’s split into four parts over two albums. There’s ecstasy to be found in the way the songs build into a noisy, orchestral climax, and if it sounds like I’m talking about sex, sure. Time your love-making to this album — it’ll never feel more epic.
7. LCD Soundsystem by LCD Soundsystem
Is LCD Soundsystem a great album? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah. (Translation: James Murphy would improve on the LCD formula with Sound of Silver and This Is Happening, but the combination of rock and disco on LCD Soundsystem, along with acid-punk, electronic, and a million other genres, too, all thrown together in a stew served at the trendiest Brooklyn restaurant you’ve never heard of, still sounds fresh, even as so many of Murphy’s past cohorts have become the proverbial #kony, a laughed-off trend from years gone by. James Murphy will never not be effortlessly cool, and songs like the sly and fuzzy “Tribulations” is why.)
8. Leaves Turn Inside You by Unwound
Final albums aren’t supposed to be good. We’ve grown so accustomed to artists wheezing out one last album before calling it quits that when a great one does come out, like Warren Zevon’s The Wind (for sad reasons) and Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods (for let’s do something else reasons), they’re exceptions to the rule, not the rule itself. Add Leaves Turn Inside You, Unwound’s 2001 post-rock masterpiece, to the outstanding pile. For 74-plus ambitious minutes, Justin Trosper, Vern Rumsey, and Brandt Sandeno are absurdly focused and tightly wound, wailing with a fractured aggression that sounds like a definitive statement. Unwound went out on top.
