This kind of topic invariably leads to a listing of primarily old albums from the 50’s. 60’s, and 70’s. Sorry youngin’s, but that’s when an album was more than a single and a bunch of filler. Actually, that’s an over-simplification. In Jazz, an album for many, many years was a single entity, a couple of compositions being part of a greater whole, if not a "concept" album at least one with a "theme". And in Country, Johnny Cash in 1964 made his tribute album to the Native American, Bitter Tears.
Such was not the case in Rock ’n’ Roll until Brian Wilson came up with the idea for his "Smile" album in 1966, it’s concept or theme being the Manifest Destiny of The United States, set to music. Quite an ambitious undertaking! As it turned out, too ambitious. Tragically, that album was sabotaged by Beach Boy Mike Love’s resistance to Brian’s new music and the lyrics by Brian’s Smile collaborator Van Dyke Parks---which he was incapable of understanding, and by Brian’s deteriorating mental condition and eventual emotional collapse. Smile remained unreleased at the time, not seeing the light of day until many years later. The Beatles had already put out two albums containing all Grade A material---Rubber Soul and Revolver---before the Sgt. Pepper’s Hearts Club Band album. It is ironic that, though credited as introducing the idea of a concept or theme album, Sgt. Pepper, unlike Rubber Soul and Revolver, contains filler material. At least I think so.
My collection contains quite a few albums I consider "perfect"---all good material, no filler. But for me, the two most perfect albums are, as I have made abundantly clear ;-), The Band’s debut---Music From Big Pink, and it’s follow up---the self titled "brown" album, two albums in my all-time Top 10. Others include Moby Grape’s s/t debut, Dave Edmund’s Get It, Iris Dement’s My Life, and Rodney Crowell’s The Houston Kid, an album about his childhood. That’s just off the top of my head.
