Diversity v. Uniformity

The problem with most 'diverse' albums is that I don't even get to track 4 without wanting to put on something else that the previous tracks reminded me of.
I suppose what I look for is 'cohesion', i.e. does it all come from the same place? Did all these songs NEED to be on the album? Do they cast fresh light on the songs they're adjacent to? Is the album a 'novel' or just a table of contents? I usually distrust eclecticism because I get the feeling the artist has no idea of what 'editing' means (i.e. Bjork, 'Amnesiac' - yes. "Hunting Bear" is very nice, but did it NEED to be on there? Would the album have suffered without it? Come to think of it, would the album have suffered without ANY of its individual parts? If not, the whole album is extraneous to itself, which explains why its less than compelling).
This is one area where 'rock' artists actually do a better job because the exigencies of having to develop a cooperative unit actually force some stylistic unity on a project (even if it's only down to certain techical details - signature drum pattern here, vocal mannerism there etc.) Which is why to my ears 'Exile on Main Street' and 'Led Zeppelin IV' work.

I agree about 'Suburban Light'; if there was an upbeat drum n' bass assault in the middle of the album, the mood would just be destroyed. When an album is uniform, it takes a couple of songs to reel me into the atmosphere the album is trying to create and anything "different" could destroy that mood. Another good example for me would be most Galaxie 500 albums.

I tend to view "diverse" albums more like a collection of singles unless the tracks really bleed into each other to create a nice flow, like "Internal Wrangler".

Great question, Mark. I was also pondering this one recently. Certainly the diversity and eclecticism of "Amesiac" works in its favour. The "Pyramid Song", "Pulk/Pull.." contrast is especially effective. The relative uniformity of sound of "Music has the Right to Children" is an asset in that it seems to suggest a soundscape rather than a collection of individual musical peices. This would seem to be the case with much post-rock ( GYBE!, Sigur Ros ) that attempts to create and cultivate a certain mood throughout the course of an album. I'll need to think about this one a little more, but I'm posting what I got.

This is basically what I meant by one of the points in that "Cult of the New" thread, except with the attached argument that things have moved noticeably toward uniformity during the past fifteen years.

I'm going to go with uniformity here, and I get the feeling that that's the tendency among people who listen to a good deal of music. If you only really own 20-30 records, internal diversity is quite helpful --- but when you're looking over 800 of them because you need one good thing to listen to on the way to work, solidity is key.

The best records, though, are those that combine both --- that is, records so unique that excursions into various styles are all unified by whatever special quality the band or the album possesses. Key Lime Pie, to take a lazy example. I must admit that I do sort of miss this in a lot of new stuff. . . and when Alasdair got momentarily noisy during the Clientele show I saw, my first thought was: why not a bit of that on the record?

More subcategories - albums where every song sounds the same but still creates a different mood on each track ('Modern Lovers', 'Parallel Lines') vs. albums that are consciously eclectic yet every track ends up having the SAME mood ('Sandinista', 'Odelay')

I always found Suburban Light to be a very diverse album, and never knew what the fuck the critics were on about. Granted, there's a pervasive "mood" but the album's lack of cohesive "flow" in sequencing + the vastly different riffs and melodies made every track standout as distinct. Interstingly, London Calling, by The Clash, seems for that reason (songs based around "I fought the law" melodic figure/rhythm) far less diverse in certain respects than their earlier work. Then there's diverse sound-palatte and similar ethos, as with Darla comps.

Tarden: that's amazing! You're right about that type of subcategory, as well as the 4 albums you've mentioned.

I do like Tarden's comparison as well. That's grist for the mill -- in fact, this whole thread and Nitsuh's "Cult of the New" one are grist for the mill. There's an FT article in this somewhere...

I enjoy sudden surprises and odd 'what the fuck' reactions -- the more so if they're unplanned as opposed to 'ha, let's do this! ha ha ha!' Almost as if the surprise is in the listener's head and not the creator's, though of course you can't exactly be sure what's in the creator's head! ;-)

Individual albums should have songs that are noticeably different, but still in the same general style of music. I don't buy a metal album to hear acoustic pop, but I don't buy it to hear 10 songs that I can't tell apart, either.

I'd call Velvet Underground & Nico, In Flames's Lunar Strain/Subterranean, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon diverse in a good way. Nevermind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols is too uniform; it's boring. Neil Young's Sleeps with Angels is too diverse; I can't stand about half the songs on it.