Changing Styles

[SorgFamily]

It's happened to many bands, some for the best others for worse. As a band grows sometimes it feels the need to break away from what they are doing and move in a different direction. Whether your Metallica moving from thrash metal to a more commercial metal sound or your Panic at the Disco ditching your dance pop to explore what to me was almost a Beatle-y sound.

I guess my questions for you are: Is there a band that changed their style that completely changed your opinion of them? For better or worse?

For myself it was the example from above: Panic at the Disco. Their first album was lumped in with the emo dance/pop genre even though there were a few songs that were decidedly not. But for me, when their second album (Pretty Odd) came out it was like a completely new band. They even started dressing differently. They developed a more straight up pop/rock sound with some brass and strings thrown in wrapped up in 60's blanket. As much as I hate the idea of comparing the sound of that record to The Beatles it's almost impossible to bring it up. For starters, the first track is a direct echo of "Sgt. Peppers" and the last track blatantly asks for a reinvention of love. In between you have a track that's basically "Honey Pie", the end of "Behind the Sea" is like their own version of the end of "Hello Goodbye" and there's just so many weird song structures throughout that are very reminiscent. Plus the fact that Ryan Ross is a huge Beatles fan doesn't hurt. After this album two of the band members wanted to go back to the dance/pop sound while Ryan felt that that would be a step backwards. So he left with another member of the group and formed The Young Veins, a band deeply rooted in the 60's rock genre. To sum it all up, imo Panic's second album was easily superior to the first but that could be because I hated the whole emo dance scene and my favorite genre is the 60's rock sound that they duplicated perfectly.

 

[Alex]

Changes in sound can be gradual or just come out of nowhere. Metallica had been going toward a more commercial sound for a while (in my opinion) and the Black Album was the apex of that.

I guess one of the bands that changed their style that I liked was Slipknot.

I'd never really got into Slipknot's first two albums (Slipknot and Iowa) all that much it just seemed like a musical mess and Corey Taylor's vocals just seemed to be a shouty thing with no sense of melody. I know it was supposed to be about the emotion and stuff but it just didn't really do it for me.

Then they released Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses. It still had the shouty vocals, but it also showed Corey Taylor could actually sing when he put his mind to it and the music was more refined. This culminated in All Hope Is Gone the next album which was a perfect blend of melodic and heavy stuff and I thought this was where Slipknot's niche finally was.