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?
Mostly just when I was younger, due to the type of content.
At 16 growing up with Green Day it’s a wide range between garage punk angry speed and stories in song. After 21st Century’s rock opera two, the band wanted to screw their contract (which had 3 albums left to be completed) so they pushed out Uno Dos and Tre to get out of that record label.
So to go from high speed anger and melodic stories to slightly more repetitive pop style music was tough. Of course now if all fits in the range and since I’m older I don’t just need the high speed anger to jam with.
I’m sure there’d be other examples for bands, but I think that’s a solid explanation of why it happened and why it doesn’t happen as much anymore. I needed their sounds then, why wasn’t it “more of the same” etc.
Somewhere it still does happen sometimes though is electronic music. There’s this vaporwave artists Blank Banshee. They did album 0 and album 1, then MEGA. MEGA was an understandable progression from the previous two, but I did not like it nearly as much as there were some tonal changes. That makes sense though, since for electronica you get a nice patch and work with it widely and then you move on. Doing much more than 1 water album would be a bit much, so I understand why Vaperror only has Mana Pool and the others are different.
I had a similar experience in the genre because I was unfortunate enough to find out about Chuck Person’s Eccojams before I had heard of Oneohtrix Point Never.