What makes a good album

Something a bit different for tonight. I thought I'd share the results of my pondering about what makes a good album (all these reviews do that to your noggin). By "album", I mean a collection of tracks (or a single track) distributed in an singular physical medium.

In my not-so-humble opinion, there are three important ingredients you can't omit or skimp on if you want to make one such "good" album deserving of the Art label with a big A.

Inspiration §

The musical and aesthetic ideas, the personality required to make something new. Yes, you can still make worthwhile stuff by focusing on the execution and polishing already well-trodden ideas, but that's not enough for the standard I'm aiming for. Creation (and thus originality) simply is the essence of Art, can't do without.

The astute reader will notice that I didn't write anything about the worth of said ideas! Indeed, this is a related but different question I'll try to answer in a later post, if only because it'd (at least) double the length of this one.

Craftsmanship §

Noun subject to improvement, "execution" could work too even if even vaguer. Simply put, the compositional talent, experience, taste, healthy self-criticism, etc… needed to refine and arrange these ideas into complete works spanning multiple minutes with a negligible amount of weaker passages or self-indulgence.

Vision §

A strong unifying aesthetic/theme that makes the difference between a collection of singles and a cohesive work that can be considered an Art piece by itself. That claim is much less controversial in other art forms, really: a good movie/novel is always more than a sum of neat scenes/chapters, these individual parts needs to progressively weave a distinct atmosphere.

Often missing, especially in singles-oriented, pandering to musicians (≈ focused on technique) or more creatively "empty" (either less ambitious or more pretentious) genres. And even more often disregarded by or outright unknown to the less sophisticated Pleb™ (Oh, did that sound elitist to you? That's normal, I probably am by most reasonable definitions.)