Tusk wouldn't have worked as a single album. Or, to put it another way, if the band were going to make a single album they would have approached their songs differently. Knowing that they were doing a double album allowed them to attack many of the songs so individually. And it's the sprawling nature of the album that enables the tunes to hang together as they do. If you dwindled the album down to 10-12 songs, I doubt the songs would be as powerful back-to-back. They'd have to have approached the album differently and come up with a more unified sound to make it work.
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