is there anything there which gives the album date

Sorta, kinda. Read on for more info (and a minor rant):

The unfortunate thing about CDDB (and its ilk) is the strange confusion between whether albums or tracks are the first-class citizens. To see what I mean, consider this: CDDB only allows an artist for the album, which means that people are forced to enter "Various" (or some theme thereof), and put "Artist / Title" in the track name field. This completely breaks things for compilations (particularly when nobody can agree on which way round to put the artist and title, or whether to use hyphen or slash as the separator). Now, IIRC, CDDB does the same thing with the year -- one per album. Again this breaks compilation albums.

However, ID3 treats the file as the first-class citizen. This means that each file can have a separate year -- which works great for compilations, but breaks your ordering query, since we can't tell (in the general case), which year an album should be filed under -- that information was lost when transferring the CDDB information into the ID3 tags.

Moreover, there's no easy way to actually collect MP3 files into albums, since there's no accepted way to uniquely identify an album, and to stash this information in the ID3 tags. Oh, sure, ID3 does define some fields that can be used for this purpose. Nobody uses them.

Then, it gets even more complicated when you consider multi-CD albums (particularly concept albums), because they ought to be played as a coherent unit, but there's nothing in the TOC or CDDB information to tie them together. This, again, is a matter of personal preference -- I don't particularly mind if I've got "Disc 1" and "Disc 2", but some people do.

And, no, you can't use the album title to collect the tracks -- I've got at least 3 albums called "Greatest Hits" in my collection.

Now, if we're talking about a closed-box system, we can collect the album together, because we ripped all of the tracks at the same time, but things start to get messy when you allow other applications to add tracks to the collection.

Bah. Rant over. For now.