I thought this was going to be a thread about lying to Big Issue vendors.

..or maybe The Wedding Present. Fair point, mind.

You'd miss out on the pleasure of
Strawberry Blonde
Whatever It Takes
Seem to Recall
Gold In Them Hills
Former Glory

and much, much more.

I'm not saying you need the complete works of RS (though no doubt others would), but it's not a case of 'heard one, heard 'em all'. Retriever and Cobblestone Runway are worth having IMHO, at least.

can't most bands can be summed up with 1 or 2 essential albums? Maybe the question should be: which artists have more 3 or more essential albums in their canon? Aside the obvious acts (Bowie, Beatles, Dylan etc), I suspect it's not that many.

This is exactly the argument my brother made to me when I came home with "Meat Is Murder". As far as he was concerned, since we had their first album we "had The Smiths"*.
It was only then I noticed the pattern that had emerged in his record buying; "Tin Drum" for the Japan sound, "Lexicon Of Love" for the ABC sound, "High Land, Hard Rain" for the Aztec Camera sound, "Treasure" for the Cocteau Twins sound...
Two things here
1. IMHO his four albums are the finest by those artists. You need to keep up a very high hit rate of career best LPs to pursue this policy.
2. In the case of very many artists he is correct. Like Mr P Wonderful I think Antony and Gorillaz keep minikng the same seam.
Other artists even make a virtue of this (We had "Back In Black" and "Ace Of Spades" too)
Dexy's would be a favourite band of mine from this time. One of the things that makes them special is how each of their albums is very different while nonetheless maintaining their essential "dexysness". Plus there are only three to collect.
*I realise as their first LP is called "The Smiths" this sentence is ambiguous, I can't help it that it was with this band he chose to make his case.

the sort of thing a rude Frenchman might say to King Arthur when asked the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

But I do think the OP makes a good point. There are many artists who either never improve on an earlier album, or who keep on making the same album over and over.

I sort of get what the OP is saying, and indeed mojo directly above. To me, though, it comes down to the songs. If a songwriter keeps writing Bloody Good Songs, I'll still want to hear them, even if the sound isn't radically different to what's gone before. I don't listen to Ron Sexsmith for anything other than his voice singing his songs. If you'd stopped after his first two albums (which are wonderful), you'd have missed out on Retriever, which is just as great if not better. If you'd thought, after enjoying Gillian Welch's first album, that you didn't need to hear any more (not that I'm knocking that view), you'd have denied yourself the pleasure of the truly magnificent Time (The Revelator). And so it goes.

Of course, there are plenty of performers who only have one or two albums worth of good songs, and there's clearly not much point in continuing to buy their stuff after that.

I'm a fan, a big fan of the 77-86 period, and I have a few of the later albums too, but I can almost create a Costello album in my head now and not be too surprised when I hear the real thing.

While I would argue that every home should have at least two, Nixon and Is a Woman, and I'd be tempted to add Aw C'Mon/No ou C'mon, any more than that and it's likely you'll be driven to hating them by the sheer saminess of them all.

I rather feel this way about my Kate Rusby albums. "Hourglass" sounds very much like "Sleepless", which sounds very much like "Little Lights", which sounds very much like "Undernesth the Stars". I stopped buying them after that.

We moan about how everything sounds the same, and then when someone comes along who sounds like nobody else, we complain if they don't do it again by the next album.

It's all rather strange. The requirement to constantly "explore" and "progress" is only ever applied to pop and rock. Nobody complains that Eliades Ochoa on Afrocubismo sounds exactly like he sounded on Buena Vista and every other recording he's made over his 50-year career. Yet we tut at Antony Hegarty because he's "going nowhere" after only three albums.

We treat musicians like fashion designers. As long as their latest collection is different from what was in last season, they're OK. Whether it's any good or not is then only a secondary consideration.

an artist or especially a band grow is the real pleasure, The Beatles up to Abbey road, Led Zep up to Physical Graffiti, The Stones up to Exile etc. After thatthe releases become superfluous. It's much harder for modern bands to achieve this though & is usually all over by the scond album.