The total number of records I have in my collection that I can play straight through without skipping tracks, I could probably count on one hand. Godflesh’s Pure; maybe one of Keiji Haino’s live sets. Yoko Kanno’s Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex album. Roxy Music’s Avalon. The list is short for a good reason: it’s a sign of the elect.

Granted, some of that is due to the way the album format has become fractured and fractured again—first by the CD, which allowed tracks to be re-ordered at will or dropped entirely; then by digital music systems, which are more song- than album-oriented. But there’s also the fact that precious few albums hold together that well as a whole: sometimes there’s just not enough strong, sustained material in that particular vein to support a whole record (the last couple of Nine Inch Nails releases felt like this for me), and sometimes the artist in question just works best as a creator of singles rather than anything more ambitious. It’s hard work to come up with a batch of songs that hang together well as a whole and survive being cut apart and heard independently.