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I tend to do most of my casual listening on shuffle, but when the mood strikes me to listen to music, I need a full album.
When I say "album" here, I mean something with progression and theme and a great depth from first to last track. When I listen to an album, I want to feel like the third track was third intentionally, and that the sixth song is connected to it somehow, even if I don't immediately understand how. Every track mustn't be brilliant and fulfilling and meaningful, but it must be there purposefully and intelligently. Some of my favourite albums have songs that downright suck on their own, but are essential to the album as a whole. I want to finish listening to an album, and have a complex feeling of what was being communicated throughout, like after reading a complicated novel.
Of course, there are good "records" in which the songs are brilliant and fun on their own (like Kings of Leon, MGMT, Green Day's old stuff) but the arrangement of the songs means little to nothing at all. While I buy and listen to these too, it tends to be on shuffle with other things.
My consistent favourites are the albums that exist as a whole, rather than a collection of parts.
A few albums I'd recommend for full on listening:
Tool: Anything after Undertow
Radiohead: Anything after Pablo Honey
Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall
Mike Oldfield: Any of them, but especially the Tubular Bells series and Guitars
The Decemberists: The Hazards of Love (though, this is a concept album, so they're cheating!)
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