Sasha Fierce and the double album

Beyonce's upcoming I Am...Sasha Fierce will be released as a double album, that rare release where (one hopes) the music is so good that they couldn't fit it all on one disc and had to give us fans two. Sadly, double albums seem born more out of marketing than necessity, which would definitely appear to be the case with Sasha Fierce. The standard version is only 11 tracks and under 45 minutes--shorter than most one-disc albums these days. Even the 16-18 track deluxe version would probably fit on one disc.

Entertainment Weekly has already reviewed the album, giving it a B+ and praising both the romantic "Beyonce" disc and the upbeat "Sasha Fierce" disc. However they also say that "the collection might have been better served had she edited it down to one disc." While this is an easy criticism to lob at a double album, it is often quite true.

Take Christina Aguilera's Back to Basics double album from 2006. The first disc explored modern takes on classic soul sounds, while the second one was on odd mix of mostly '40s motifs. At 22 tracks it was really long--there were definitely great tracks but also those that could have been cut. Rolling Stone's review remarked that "at one disc, this would have been nothing short of masterful." I don't if I'd go as far as "masterful," but certainly better.

Nellie McKay's reasoning for insisting her debut album Get Away from Me be a double--that she wanted listeners to have something akin to the experience of flipping over a record--is either quaint or just plain rediculous when you consider that in the MP3 player age few people are listening to CDs much, even if they are still buying them.

Then there are double albums that are just disasters. British pop singer Gareth Gates's second album Go Your Own Way comes to mind. The "daytime" and "nighttime" concept was pretty dubious--do his songs really sound tha different? The album performed so poorly that its title became a command from BMG records, and a few years later Gates' contract was pulled.

There have been some sucessful doubles though. Red Hot Chili Peppers' 2006 album Stadium Arcadium was a big seller, an Album of the Year Grammy nominee and widely praised as one of their best works. Outkast's 2003 album Speakerboxx/The Love Below (really two solo albums from Outkast's two members) won the Album of the Year Grammy and produced one of the decade's defining hit singles, "Hey Ya."

Still, it seems that more often than not the double represents more of a gimmick than a true artistic statement. In the age of digital downloads, a listener might not even know they're listening to a double--it may just seem like a really long album with more than the usual number of tracks to skip through. For those who do pay attention, double albums can create a feeling of "more is less"--that the album would have been stronger had they been willing to do some editing and just give us a shorter set of really great songs rather than a longer mix of gems and duds.