Unpretentious concept albums

Music
1

Album about the singer travelling back in time to join a steampunk rock opera featuring his lost love? No thank you

Concept album with each track covering one level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the form of a space opera? Not here please

Which cover albums do you like with fun and/or unpretentious concepts?

For example:

  • MF DOOM- MM FOOD (each track mentions the name of a food or drink)
  • Gilla Band- Holding Hands with Jamie (slightly more obscure, but I each track seems to reference some sort of food)
  • Down I Go: This is Disastercore (every track is about a particular historical disaster)
2 Likes
2

Nearly pretentious but early death metal so im going with just silly -

The Key by Nocturnus - The story follows a cyborg who travels back in time to the year 0 B.C. to assassinate Jesus Christ which leads to the destruction of Christianity (highlighted by the controversial track “Destroying the Manger”) and the creation of a modern empire.

3 Likes
3

The entire Graf Orlock back catalogue which pulls from genre cinema for each release

Arnocorps with their arnie concept works well. Keep running!

3 Likes
4

Sufjan - Illinois and Michigan.

15 Likes
5

A Grand Don’t Come For Free

12 Likes
6

The Decemberists - The Hazards Of Love

5 Likes
7

Fire - Electric Six
(the concept is saying Fire a lot)

10 Likes
8

Don’t know whether Richard Dawson’s past-present-future trilogy might qualify in this thread as pretentious (even though he’s a very unpretentious guy) but his Circle collab album Henki being all about plants should count at least

5 Likes
9

Mastodon - Leviathan

Moby Dick innit

8 Likes
10

Came to say Down I Go, saw it was already covered, good work! (The recent one about a Japanese Doomsday cult might be their best work).

Jetplane Landing - Backlash Cop is a concept album about jazz, the black arts movement and boxing (possibly).

Hot damn, now that’s a fucking band. The Dream Left Behind absolutely RIPS.

2 Likes
11

I got that played on the Kermode and Mayo show

4 Likes
12

The Mountain Goats - Beat the Champ

3 Likes
13

What’s that about?

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6 Likes
15

True, and possibly Blood Mountain, which is just basically a big hero’s journey.

Crack the Skye is awesome but the concept is definitely quite tricky to get.

16

Are Dan the Automator’s various projects pretentious? Cause Deltron 3030, Handsome Boy Modeling School and Lovage are all up there.

Dr. Octagon too.

5 Likes
17

Gruff Rhys - American Interior (about the life of his explorer ancestor who went looking for a tribe of Welsh speaking Native Americans in the 1700s)

3 Likes
18

Rudimentary Peni - ‘Cacophony’ (about HP Lovecraft)
Neutral Milk Hotel - ‘In the Airplane over the Sea’ (Anne Frank). I’ll let others decide if it fails the pretentious test.

2 Likes
19

The first 4 Mastodon albums are all individually concept albums, but they are all grouped together under the concept of relating to the classical elements. Remission being fire, Leviathan water, Blood Mountain is earth and Crack the Skye is air.

All actually extremely pretentious, but they’re great records and the quality of the bands output fell of a cliff from there on so think they get a pass.

1 Like
20

Janelle Monae’s Metropolis Saga (this may be pretentious but I think it’s too fun for that)
Beyonce’s Lemonade

5 Likes