“THE DOUBLE ALBUM”—considered by many to be a vestige of rock’s masturbatory past—is an affront to the modern music fan’s stroboscopic attention span. But the medium is experiencing something of a comeback in indie rock circles, from Titus Andronicus’The Most Lamentable Tragedy and Tenement’s Predatory Headlights to Portland band Strange Ranger’s debut, Rot Forever—just three recent examples of critically acclaimed, punk-flecked rock albums that contain well over an hour’s worth of music.
The format’s staunchest detractors argue that virtually every double album could be whittled down to a superior, single LP, but these listeners miss the point. The most effective double albums—Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade, Bruce Springsteen’s The River, the goddamned White Album—succeed precisely due to their intractable disregard for stylistic consistency. At worst, double albums are self-indulgent and onerously conceptual, but at best, they let an artist flex their creative musculature in ways that wouldn’t make sense in the context of a single LP.