I had to move this discussion from Indie Rock because I guess it didn't belong there. The question in the title has bothered me since my friend Joey left me to go to California to become a musician.

What makes an album good? I'm not talking about the simple things. Such as music and lyrics. I'm talking about how soon the vocals appear in the songs, the positioning of the album as a whole, length of the songs, etc.

As my example, I'll use one of my favorite albums. Modest Mouse "The Moon and Antarctica". On 13 of 15 songs, you hear Isaac singing within 30 seconds. Does the quickness of the vocals catch the listener's interest better? Then, I read allmusicguide's review of the album, and they praised it for the most part. They did have one problem with it though. That problem being the positioning of "Alone Down There, The Stars are Projectors, and The Cold Part." They said it slowed down the momentum of the album. If they had placed those songs in different places, would the album be better?

Discuss.

I am sorry that you are not getting the quality responses that you had hoped for. However, this is a difficult topic to simply have a cut and dry answer for, there’s a lot of gray area here. I have a feeling like there is already a similar topic floating around somewhere but alas, I don’t feel like looking for it. I will try to provide somewhat intelligent feedback though.

Since you don’t want to discuss the music or lyrics I will note that I believe sequencing to be essential for an album to be great. I don’t have many problems with Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica, I think every bit of it is spectacular. I also don’t really care about the length an album is. The trend has been that more and more people love those 9-11 song albums that run between 40-50 minutes long. I don’t really mind if an album is much longer as long as the music doesn’t suffer in terms of quality. Naturally, there are some albums that need to be shorter and need to be better edited but some are nice and long and they still sound great.

As for how soon or not soon the voices should enter, that really seems like a baseless point. Obviously you bought an album that is filled with songs (meaning music accompanied with words) so the singer will eventually sing. Some albums have gorgeous instrumental songs or even sections of songs that work well in the scheme of the album. I think, as long as the singer sings on the song, whenever he comes in, it will be fine.

I hope some of that rambling helps though.

I tend to judge albums on a song-to-song basis; if i like each of the songs by themselves, that's great. If the album has a good flow and momentum to it that's a big plus. If an album sounds good as a whole and you can pick almost any song off of there and enjoy it by itself, that's what constitutes a great album in my opinion.

I always thought that albums were good if you could put it in and not have to search for a track.