Can iTunes show albums just once in list of albums?

Question

For illustration purposes:
If I have just one album in my library by a single artist: In Album grid view, I'd see one album cover as expected. If you double click the cover you'd see the list of songs in that album - all as expected.
If you click list view (upper right) while looking at the one album cover, you expect to see one line of text with the artist's name, and then if more detail is desired, clicking that text line, you'd get the the list of songs.
Not so... iTunes shows all the songs in that album when going from Album grid view (1 album), to Album list view - all songs in that album.
So... being that I have 100's of albums, instead of seeing a list of albums, I see a list of all songs.
It seems that the only way to see all the albums in your library is in the graphic album cover view?
Can't I see just a text listing of all my albums?

Answer 1

I have 553 artists, 1045 albums and 12,045 songs. What I would like is to see a list of just my 553 artists. Instead I see a list of all 12,045 songs sorted by artist/album. This is very unusable way to look at the data. We need a hierachical view.
Since I have 4 AC/DC albums, for example, my list starts out with AC/DC listed under Artist 40 times since there are 4 albums each with 10 tracks.
I would hope there's a way to just show AC/DC once, with an arrow or ability to double click to open this up just like it was a folder in Finder list view.
Doing so would show me 4 AC/DC albums, clicking any of those would show me the tracks for that album.
I want to see by artist:
AC/DC
Aerosmith
Al Green
And then if I open AC/DC:
AC/DC
--Back in Black
--Dirty Deeds
--High Voltage
--Powerage
Aerosmith
Al Green
If I open Back/Black:
AC/DC
--Back in Black
----Hells Bells
----Shoot To Thrill
----etc...
--Dirty Deeds
--High Voltage
--Powerage
Aerosmith
Al Green
There needs to be a way to collapse all the songs down into by albums and down into by artist.