79 minute albums...What do you think?

If you have 79 minutes of solid material, a 79 minute album is great.  If you have 40 minutes of solid material, a 40 minute album is great.  If you have 20 minutes of solid material, by all means a 20 minute EP is great.  Album length doesn't matter so long as the music is good. 

On a related note, why do people get so harsh on albums about a "filler" track?  There's two possibilities:
1. You can't stand the song; you skip it.  No problem for you at all.
2. You like it to some extent.  It increases your enjoyment of the album.

Either way, you the album doesn't get worse for the inclusion of a weak track. 


Edited by rileydog22 - May 12 2007 at 01:00

If you ask me, i prefer those 40 - 50 minute albums, but anyway i think that no matter the lenght, an album is good if  it keeps you hooked the whole time, i love very short albums like Goblin`s Profondo Rosso, or Amarok by Oldfield which is very long.

45 minutes is the ideal length for a non-concept album.

Live albums, however, are best when in a triple-CD digipack.

I personally find 79 minute albums too long, with a few exceptions. I usually like to listen to my cd's on the way to work, or walking to whereever i need to be, and rarely do i ever finish a 79 minute album, i most of the time listen in sections, or one part of the album is rarely listened to.

I think 40-60 minutes is just fine for an album

Very wise, with that I take my leave

Or not, I just can't be arsed through tiredness to explain myself, resulting in me 'babbling'.

coleio wrote: My response to your liking of 35 minute albums was ineffable, explaining my lack of rationale. It isn't really concise, just short I think it would always feel it was missing something, especially in prog. I mean there are probably Girls Aloud albums that are longer than that... I had finished listening to Dream Theaters new album today, and that's over an hour long and I felt it was short, maybe it's just me...

So you're not actually making examples of bad albums that last less than forty minutes, but incredibly, just stating that short albums are awful?

At least if you'd stated an opinion such as "artists don't have sufficient time to vary their themes over such a short duration" or even "CDs that hold less than an hour's worth of music are overpriced" I'd care, but either way, the band themselves decided on the album's length so it's a complete work of art as given. So as it is... you're babbling, man, snap out of it. =P

I'm with laplace here, colelo. What on earth is un-proggy about listening to 35-45 minute albums? With only a handful exceptions that is the amount of music you could comfortably FIT on an LP. Anything more than that and you were indeed into double-album territory.

Gentle Giant never really went over 40 minutes on their studio releases and they were all the better for it. Every note MATTERED.

My response to your liking of 35 minute albums was ineffable, explaining my lack of rationale.

It isn't really concise, just short I think it would always feel it was missing something, especially in prog. I mean there are probably Girls Aloud albums that are longer than that...

I had finished listening to Dream Theaters new album today, and that's over an hour long and I felt it was short, maybe it's just me...

Well, when your whole case is "Awful", it's ample. ;P What's so awful about concise albums, as you'd put it?