Departures for Artists

[Guest converge241]

basically when a band makes a 180 degree change

you can rate it by commercial standards or quality or any melding of the two

 

my best is a reverse one -Ministry "with Sympathy" its their first album and the changed to their regular style after it but i hold a special place for this kind of cheesy album

 

worst , by a commercial view was U2's pop..i like some songs on it but the album bombed , and sure enough on the next one, they go back to the older style

 

personal worst was Danzig - Danzig 5 blackaciddevil..good job Glenn , elimiante one of the strongest selling points - your vocals. At least he admitted that it was a screw up and he went to a lords of Acid/thrill Kill Kult show and was just trying to emulate that style

or

Life Of Agony - Soul Searching Sun

for the most part it was pop rubbish

[Guest ryankeast]

I thought Pop was a decent offering, a gew dodgey tunes though. But yes commercially it wasn't as big as previous offerings. Discoteque is KICK ASS though.

 

You could say though that U2 did it best when they went from The Joshua Tree or Rattle / Hum to a new darker, edgey (no pun) sound with Achtung Baby in 1991which is a quality offering.

[Guest converge241]

discoteche and please were my favs

[Guest godthedog]

best are...

 

beatles: rubber soul

beatles: revolver

beatles: sgt pepper

beatles: white album

beatles: abbey road

 

velvet underground: white light/white heat

velvet underground: grey album

velvet underground: loaded

 

worst...

 

nine inch nails: the fragile

 

tori amos: to venus and back

 

that's all i can think of at the moment.

[Guest Nevermortal]

Soulfly - 3

 

Max finally gets away from having about 375492 guest appearances (Fred Durst...arrrgghhghg) on his first two albums and comes out with a solid (not great) album that was fun to listen to.

 

The Misfits - Graves Era

 

I understand the logic with wanting to revive the Misfits, but ITS NOT THE MISFITS WITHOUT DANZIG. Not to say that the songs are bad, but it doesn't sound like the Misfits at all, and thus, I just cannot accept it. Although "Dig Up Her Bones" kicks so much ass, it just cannot compare to shit like "Where Eagles Dare", "Ghoul's Night Out", and "Death Comes Ripping".

 

AFI - Black Sails in the Sunset

 

If you wanna get uber technical, you could say the EP before this CD, but whatever. AFI snaps out of their shittiness to produce some fucken great music that is not confined to punk. I'm sure someone'll disagree with me here, but fuck it. AFI got better with this one.

 

Cradle of Filth - Cruelty and The Beast

 

I know you'd predict that I'd name "Bitter Suites to Succubi" as the biggest departure, but I'm not gonna. This concept album, while really good lacks one thing....POWER. This album does not have the crushing instrumental assault that the others have. Everything is tuned down and lowered. Nick's drums, one of the heaviest things in the world gets reduced to the equivalent of a baby banging a pencil on the bottom of a coffee can. Luckily with the next EP and Midian, they picked up the sound.

[Guest converge241]

"AFI - Black Sails in the Sunset

 

If you wanna get uber technical, you could say the EP before this CD, but whatever. AFI snaps out of their shittiness to produce some fucken great music that is not confined to punk. I'm sure someone'll disagree with me here, but fuck it. AFI got better with this one."

 

yes they got much much better

[Guest godthedog]

oh crap, i gotta back it up with REASONS. ok, i'll do the velvet albums for now:

 

white light/white heat: i'm not sure if this counts as a departure, as all they really did was take the already-intense sound from 'nico' & bring it to its logical conclusion. but the 2 albums do sound vastly different. noise is just a part of the sound on 'nico', while it's the MAIN sound on 'white light', especially on side 2. it's almost jazz noise, the way they keep trying to take it up further and improvise off each other, making it into an art form & trying to make it beautiful in its own way.

 

grey album: i don't think any 2 records made back-to-back in the history of recorded music sound more different than 'white light' and the grey album. mainly influenced by john cale's departure (and most of their pedals being stolen), it creates an entirely different tone & maintains it flawlessly for the whole record. the sound is clean, warm, soft and intimate, not unlike the vagina of a young maiden, & the focus is almost entirely on the songs. and oh my god do the songs ever shine. MUCH better compositions than 'white light' (cause, let's face it, the songs on 'white light' really just seem like a backdrop for all the experimentation). 'white light' tried to capture the adrenaline rush, this one captures the emotional rush.

 

'loaded': yet another change of direction. comparatively the velvets' strangest album, cause it's more or less a pop record. i believe the story behind this one is that their new record company wanted an album "loaded with hits" out of them, & reed basically did it to prove that he could make as catchy an album as anybody. this is the record that gets the most shit from hardcore velvet fans, cause it sounds so poppy (and cause moe tucker isn't on it), but fuck them--it's got no less than 4 of the best songs lou reed EVER wrote, and it's a flat-out great record. in terms of pure songwriting, depth of lyrics, emotion, it's a better fucking pop record than 'sgt pepper'. and it sounds almost as diverse.

 

while i'm on this rave, i'd like to suggest that so many total changes in such a short period of time are unmatched in rock music (even the beatles), and the fact that they did it so perfectly and effortlessly is the reason they're the best american band ever.

 

diversity is a hugely important thing for me. my favorite artists tend to be the ones who go in the most different directions.

 

i'm pretty wired on coffee right now and feeling really really verbose (which is good, cause i'm trying to write a paper tonight), so i may come back later tonight & do beatles albums.

[Guest Kinetic]

the sound is clean, warm, soft and intimate, not unlike the vagina of a young maiden

 

Good god.

 

Probably the most famous and controversial departure for a musician was Bob Dylan's recording of a totally electric side for Bringing It All Back Home. I think it's hard to really grasp how controversial a decision that was and how seriously a large portion of his existing fanbase took it. It was like a sort of heresy.

 

I'd be remiss in not mentioning Radiohead, whose sound changes and evolves with each and every record. Except for Amnesiac, which either does or does not suck, depending on who you're listening to.

 

I can't think of any super-obscure indie rock band to mention here, unfortunately. Sorry, kids.

[Guest Incandenza]

godthedog did an excellent job on VU, so I'll try this, instead:

 

For the Better

 

Tom Waits--Throughout the whole of 70s, Waits was something of a boho jazz guy; a lounge lizard with a fondness for booze, strippers and piano ballads. Nothing wrong with any of that; Waits was quite good at it. However, the persona he had fashioned for himself was beginning to wear thin around the time of 1980's Heartattack and Vine. Fortunately, he discovered his inner freak shortly thereafter, and out came the noise merchant of Swordfishtrombones in 1983. No longer concerned with writing pretty love songs--though he could still turn out a heartwrencher--Waits' journey into the avant garde produced his best work, and he's still putting out solid music almost two decades later.

 

I'll do more later.

[Guest Kinetic]

i'm pretty wired on coffee right now and feeling really really verbose (which is good, cause i'm trying to write a paper tonight), so i may come back later tonight & do beatles albums.

I'd be delighted to see The Beatles compared to a vagina. Any sort of vagina will do.

[Guest godthedog]

les beatles, here we go:

 

rubber soul: for all intents & purposes, the beginning of the revolution. the record that saw them begin to be taken seriously as legitimate artists. broke new ground in 2 areas--songwriting and overall sound. 'nowhere man' was the first nontraditional boy-meets-girl track they ever recorded. 'norwegian wood' was boy-meets-girl, but with a nice humanistic twist to it. 'in my life' had a love story, but that was hardly the main focus of the song. the beatles branched off in 2 different directions at once with the general sound: making it harder (as in tracks like 'drive my car' or 'run for your life', which rocked a little harder & were less poppy than pervious work) and softer (as in 'michelle', 'girl' and 'norwegian wood', all of which put acoustic guitars HEAVILY at the forefront of the sound) at the same time. while rocking a little more than earlier efforts, the album still has a very organic, earthy, smokey sound, not unlike the many finely rolled joints the beatles must have had when they were recording this thing. and i haven't even gotten to the handful of wonderful instrumental experiments. 'norwegian wood' is the first time they used a sitar, and 'in my life' has a victorian harpsichord-sounding solo in the middle of it.

 

revolver: songwriting & sound experimentation shoot through the roof on this album. went out in a completely different direction from acoustic-dominated tracks (with a couple exceptions) to an even more diverse sound. a sound so diverse i can't even sum it up properly. going in 14 different directions at once, as only the beatles can. good example is comparing the 2 mccartney-written piano tracks, 'good day sunshine' and 'for no one'. they probably have more in common with each other musically than any other 2 tracks on the album, and the songs still could not be more different. they throw in every trick they can possibly think of: all-indian instruments ('love you to'), twangy byrds-like guitars ('and your bird can sing'), singalongs with lennon goofing off on the spoken verse ('yellow submarine'), strings-only ('eleanor rigby'), horns-dominated ('got to get you into my life'), gorgeous harmonies ('doctor robert', 'taxman'), even backward tape loops ('tomorrow never knows', 'i'm only sleeping'). and the quality of the songwriting holds it all together, making the jump from track to track seem effortless.

 

sgt pepper: whether or not this is the first "concept album" isn't really relevant. what is relevant is that mccartney found a way to keep the 'revolver'-like diversity on the album while holding it all together even MORE strongly. even more experimentation with song styles, with a conclusion so amazing in songwriting and sound that they would never top it. until very recently, was considered by most to be the greatest popular music album ever made. i personally don't agree, but its influence is undeniable: even the album design (with the great cover, the gatefold vinyl, & the lyrics printed on the back) set a new standard for rock music.

 

white album: structurally, the polar opposite of 'pepper'. fevered, chaotic, & jumpy. in a band known for its diversity among tracks, this is probably the most diverse one they ever recorded ('obladi obladah', 'helter skelter', 'julia', 'revolution 9', and 'honey pie' on the same album? these barely sound like they were recorded by the same group). they show a willingness to throw themselves completely into each and every song; so much willingness that the album barely holds itself together. each song on an album never got this kind of specific individual treatment, before or since.

 

abbey road: this is where it gets good. sums up everything about their post-'help' period, past & present, very nicely. side one covers and equals highlights from their recording career: 'come together' is the equal of every straight rock song lennon had written, 'something' and 'octopus's garden' top everything george & ringo had contributed, 'maxwell's silver hammer' is paul's playfulness at his absolute best, and 'oh darling' equals everything they'd ripped off from the blues up to that point. vocals are top-notch too: mccartney gives probably his best vocal display ever in 'oh darling', ringo actually sounds melodic and NOBODY can unleash a guttural scream like lennon. the vocals in 'i want you' are seething, raw, raspy, and almost subhuman, much like courtney love's tattered vagina.

and this is just the side where they cover the stuff they've done before.

side 2 thows away all musical rules, save for the 3 most basic: rhythm, melody and harmony. the "rock opera," as it's now called, is an enormous exploration of these 3 principles in one fluid movement from song to song (sometimes even from verse to verse), using melodies like motifs in a novel or a symphony, until the music breaks down past the point of even being a song, where it's only guitars, bass, drums and lyrics. it almost tops 'a day in the life' for sheer balls and ambition. almost.

[Guest meanmaisch]

I think that the main reason U2's Pop bombed was because people saw right through the "techno" facade that the band had put up. While their previous album Zooropa had a lot of techno and dance elements, it wasn't hyped as much and thus was allowed the chance to find its own niche. It also was made very quickly, so there wasn't the same kind of hype and waiting that Pop produced. Pop has a lot of decent songs on it that could have been better without all the techno add-ons, but because of the amount of attention made to the "new sound of U2", the album suffered. I think a lot of their fans felt they went too far and felt that the new techno U2 was a bit too crass and fake.

[Guest ryankeast]

Loved reading your reviews on The Beatles albums.

 

What is youtr overall favourite Beatles Album?

 

I totally agree about the U2 Pop album aswell as it isn't a bad album, but i just think loyal U2 fans didn't know how to take the new 'Hip' sound and that large silver Lemon.

[Guest godthedog]

abbey road. followed closely by revolver, followed closely by the white album.

[Guest CoreyLazarus416]

Black Album. 'Nuff said.