I’ve noticed that the majority of bands I’ve loved since I was younger have entirely abandoned their old style for music that feels far more bland and uninteresting. It breaks my heart to no end when a band I’ve loved releases a new album and by halfway through you’re done with it.
Lately this has been happening too often to me. Anyone else notice this with their music selection of choice?
This can go a number of ways, I think.
You get bands who hold on to their original sound with a vice-like grip, and invariably get kinda stale (I’m thinking Green Day here), you get bands that adapt their sound to their current circumstances and current market trends, who end up getting kinda stale. Then you get bands who just do what they damn well please, and that one is interesting to me.
Ultimately, though, we mostly get the second of those. Bands like Coldplay, whose first few albums are interesting, in a middle-class-dinner-party kind of way, but by the fourth record had hit a point where they needed to keep making money, but maybe didn’t have the inspiration they needed to make interesting music. U2, Snow Patrol, Biffy Clyro, and sadly (from my personal view) the Foo Fighters. They churn out records, sell the merch, play the stadia around the world, but the music doesn’t move me in any way, not like their earlier stuff does.
But I don’t blame them; they’re reacting to the world we live in, making music is their career, and they’re under contract to bang out a new collection of tunes every couple of years, whether they’re inspired to or not. Having said that about the Food though, their latest album is genuinely wonderful, so it’s not all bad.
I don’t think Greenday stuck to their laurels. They were straight up punk in Dookie, but got much more pop and slow and whiny as they progressed. Wake me up when September ends.