I use NetRemote as my front end to MC and this allows me to configure it to do pretty much anything I want.
What you describe is exactly what I do too so I have one button in my NetRemote interface that will display the tracks on the album for the currently playing song and one further button that will play all the songs from that album. I could easily change it so it was one single button that would play the album of the currently playing track. That's how powerful NetRemote and MC are when used together.
When I don't know what album to play I use a random view scheme that randomly picks 2 songs from 10 different albums (i.e. 20 tracks) so I scan through them until I find one I want to listen to.
I have further buttons in NR that will do the following with one click:
- Show all tracks from the currently playing artist
- Show all tracks from the currently playing artist rated 3 or more
- Show a list of all albums by the currently playing artist
If you are not an NR user you should be jealous!
You can see some pics of my NR interface with graphics by Dragyn
here.