The White Album

I was recently reading the Wowee Zowee edition of the great 33 1/3 series of books and, as I expected, someone compared WZ to the Beatles' White Album. This got me to thinking about what exactly that comparison means - it certainly gets thrown about quite a bit in the music press; comparing a given artist's work with the iconic Beatles album. One of the first instances I remember was in a description of One Chord to Another by Sloan. I think in that context it meant that each member of that band, which also has four singer-songwriters, was using the other members to back them up on a wide ranging set of strong songs that were essentially solo compositions. But since then I have heard the White Album comparison in a number of other ways which seem to imply the following qualities: long, in need of editing, varied both in style and song length, containing sonic experimentation ("number 9, number 9 ...), and often involving a variety of songwriters. If this is the case, the One Chord makes a poor comparison and the Sloan album worthy of the tag is Never Hear the End of It. I have also thought impenetrable is often implied in the comparison but I find the Beatles anything but impenetrable, although many of the albums I think of as "their White Album" I do find took some work to appreciate: Sandanista!, Have One on Me, Sign O the Times ...