Do you listen to single tracks or full albums? Options

[mipadi]

When listening to music, do you typically listen to single tracks, or the full (unshuffled album)? I get the feeling that most people listen to a playlist or shuffle their entire library, but I typically listen to a full album at a time. Good albums have cohesion, and I think it's hard -- jarring, even -- to just listen to a track at a time. Take Radiohead, for example: In Rainbows or OK Computer just fits together like a puzzle, and makes more sense when heard together. And I can't imagine listening to a single track from a Dream Theater album.

The flipside is that most mainstream albums consist of one or two good singles and 10-12 crappy songs, and have no cohesion whatsoever.

[Gigi]

When I'm really bored and I'm just listening to music to fill up some space, I'll use shuffle.

But when I want to REALLY listen to music, I want to listen to it in its intended glorious full album state. Unfortunately, there are only a few albums that I would ever want to do that with though (most albums these days have 2-3 singles and you feel like the rest of the LP is there to fill the album with crap). And even if the songs are all pretty good, most bands suffer from having songs that sound incredibly alike (e.g. Franz Ferdinand).

I don't do listen to albums often though, since it usually requires a good bit of effort, so you can't be doing homework at the same time...which is my other gripe, that most music listeners these days do it sort of passively, without thought, as a silence filler.

For me it would also be Radiohead's OK Computer and In Rainbows. Also, Kid A, and Sufjan Stevens' Illinois. Yes, (most of) the individual songs are brilliant, but the full albums are considerably better. Like you said, the album heard in its entirety allows you to sort of grasp its central theme and use that new understanding to discover something new about songs you've already loved. There's something hearing these album openers...that even if I hear them when I'm shuffling, I want to listen to the whole album.

I used to do the torrent the whole album and give it a shot thing, but I've been greatly disappointed and it's just taken up a lot of space on my hard drive. Time to do some cleaning up...