VMP Magazine

In the world of fantasy literature, you’re nobody until you’ve written a series of books. Preferably, a trilogy. While the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan has (though a little controversially) stressed the similarities between literature and popular music, comparable trilogies in music are not all that common. They exist though, and when they occur, they account for some of pop music’s greatest pieces of cohesive storytelling. Even if the three albums are not explicitly tied together when it comes to their themes, album trilogies still succeed in painting a vivid picture of the artistic period the musician was going through at the time of recording them.

Three's a charm, so let us celebrate the 10 best album trilogies to own on vinyl, including the works of icons like Bob Dylan and the late David Bowie, as well as records from modern masters of hip-hop and electro.

There’s a point, which may have already happened, when we will run out of potential album covers. Something like 75,000 albums are released each year, which means that there are 75,000 decisions made about what the cover of said albums will look like. Understandably, there have already been a lot of albums with artwork that seem to share significant amount of overlap.

We’ve selected 10 covers of album covers that look like they’re “covers” of other covers. Some covers seem like parodies, others seem like plagiarism. Of course, in some cases it is still unclear if we are dealing with copying and laziness or with coincidental look-a-likes, but all of the 10 combinations of album covers here are certainly covering other covers.

If there is any format that truly belongs to the vinyl era, it’s the double album. Holding the cover art in your hands is amazing as it is, but the experience which is so central to vinyl collecting is only upgraded by big gatefold sleeves opening up before your eyes. Not to mention four sides of music, each with their own beginning, arc and ending. The double album actually only makes sense when experienced on vinyl: in the CD age, when a single disc could contain up to 80 minutes of music, even regular albums seemed to become more filler and less killer. In the limitless era of streaming and digital downloading, the double albums perhaps makes the least sense of all.

That isn’t to say, however, that all double albums can be classified as such. The double album is a tricky thing, as many of them that are more adventurous than admirable prove. Simply stated: there are just too many double albums that didn’t need to be a double album. Artists who set out for an artistic highlight in their career and think the format can help them in achieving it, often fail and end up releasing overblown albums which would have been much closer to the intended masterpieces if changed to a comprehensive single album. These 10, however, do not suffer from that problem.

With a population of well over 500,000, Manchester is the fifth biggest city of England. Yet the city is also one of the most tight-knit communities you will find in Britain, as the heart-warming responses of Manchester’s inhabitants after the horrific attack on an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena showed. The role music has played and still plays in Manchester soon became evident, as people who gathered at impromptu memorials started singing songs, most notably Manchester’s own Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back In Anger.” The song was later covered by no other than Coldplay at One Love Manchester, a star-studded tribute to the victims and their families, and quite probably one of the most historic events in popular music to ever occur.

Manchester’s creative community has spawned so many memorable musicians and bands. There is something about Manchester that can’t be found anywhere else in the world. While the ’60s in Manchester saw some serious musical business, mainly brought by the Hollies, the Bee Gees, Herman’s Hermits (who at that time outsold the Beatles) and their companions, the turning point for the scene was June 4, 1976. At the invitation of Buzzcocks, the Sex Pistols played a show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, which was attended by no more than 42 people. Among them, however, were Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner of Joy Division and New Order, Morrissey (who would later form the Smiths), Mark E Smith of the Fall and Paul Morley, who would become an influential music writer. They would all outgrow their humble beginnings and become members in bands responsible for some of the best British music ever.

Inspired by those bands and the drug ecstasy, a new scene soon started to form. As the 1980s drew to a close, the Haçienda night club became the centre of creativity in Manchester. The place, which opened in May 1982 and was part of the Factory Records empire, became hugely influential. The venue played pop music with club appeal and hosted shows by the Smiths and New Order, but also gigs by a new generation of bands from Manchester who fit the crossroads of club and concert perfectly. The genre of Madchester was born. It became known for its ’60s-inspired style of psychedelica mixed with warped wah-wah basslines and jingle-jangle guitars, a sound which also has often been described as “baggy.” Doesn’t exactly sound like a sound destined for greatness, right? But, as this list hopefully proves, Madchester made for some of the most seminal records British pop history.

Born in the parky pubs of London around 1990, Brit pop’s pale pop songs provided the perfect soundtrack for British life. It wasn’t all doom and gloom though: bands like Oasis, Blur and Suede showcased a swagger that the world had seldom witnessed before. Their arena filling anthems drew on the decades of the Beatles and Madchester, but they defined their own. The scrappy scene soon turned so successful it seemed like a matter of time before it would burn out. Britpop did fade away when the ‘90s ended, but its flame was never truly extinguished. As these ten albums prove, the music and mindset of Britpop’s biggest and best bands still serves as a source of nostalgia and a longing for long lost days, but also as a reason of hope for better days to come again.

There’s probably thousands of Beatles tribute bands worldwide. In the Netherlands, however, there is one that stands above all other Fab Four imitators: the Analogues. The Analogues approach the tunes of the Fab Four as if it were classical music. “We think that you simply can’t achieve a real, authentic sound with digital short cuts,” the band state on their official website. That’s why the Analogues, who were called “terrifyingly good” and “truly spectacular” by well-respected national newspapers, decided to gather the same kind of instruments the Beatles used and made it their mission to play all studio albums that the British pop pioneers never performed live themselves.

In the history of pop music, not many artists have been as prolific as Frank Zappa. During his lifetime, the gonzo guitarist released 62 albums with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. After his death in 1994 of prostate cancer, the Zappa Family Trust continued where the Master of Invention himself had left off. Zappa’s 100th official album, Dance Me This, the final record completed by the composer before his death, was released in the summer of 2015. The 43 albums released posthumously make for a total of 105 albums.

More important than the quantity of Zappa’s discography, however, is its quality. Being a completely self-taught composer and performer, Zappa was one of the key figures in the breakdown of boundaries within popular music. His career did not only span three decades, it also united genres like rock, pop, jazz and classical music into one discography. While he initially rose to fame as member of the Mothers of Invention, it was clear from the start who was in charge. In fact, before Zappa came aboard, the collective was a R&B group called the Soul Giants. Zappa replaced guitarist David Coronado and insisted the band start playing his original material. The rest is – the cliché is true in this case – history, as this list of The 10 Best Frank Zappa Albums to Own on Vinyl proves.

These days, most albums are impossible to separate from the story of their creation. In a lot of ways, the creation is as much of a story as the album itself. Think of the band Tennis recording their album on a sailing trip, or Gucci Mane recording Everbody’s Looking while on house arrest. But the opposite can be true too: Sometimes, the music itself has a story, and an album isn’t just a collection of songs: the album has an overarching story you can trace throughout the album.

So, here’s a celebration of those albums that have that bigger story. We present the 10 best concept albums to own on vinyl.