Bands or musicians who strayed far from their roots

[Soot and Stars]

Early hard rock Aerosmith is the best incarnation of the band...sorry Sooty had to put my two cents worth in.

LOL....this doesn't mean I abandoned them. They still have gems on each and every album. And I do applaud them for staying alive in a very hungry music industry. Aerosmith is still a HUGE name in rock

I can't help myself! I feel this way about most bands! I like change in music and I always feel a band just gets better as they get more comfortable in their songwriting and their place in music. Sometimes they sound more mainstream as a result but I think this is more of a result of tighter songwriting and more of a sense of what they want than anything else. I get more disappointed in a band if they keep trying to capture their hit formula than anything!

For Aerosmith I found Nine Lives to be a great experimentation in Indian sounds, some country and still have their blues elements and great ballads. One of their best works period IMO!

 

[AboutAGirl]

Back when I was into death metal my favorite act was Cryptopsy. They were really good with Lord Worm and had a couple missteps without him but it all came to a crashing hault when they decided to play mallcore music.

Death metal Cryptopsy:



Still a f@!@!ng awesome song. \m/

Now here's deathcore Cryptopsy:



I like some deathcore. And I like when bands branch out. But this **** is just bad. Annoying and boring. Lord Worm is essential to Crytopsy in my view. If they had branched in this direction with Lord Worm, that would have been so much better.

In my view the guy who morphed with the times better than anyone was Neil Young. He never managed to make waves in the 80s, but when the 90s started rolling around the vogue was switching back to what Neil Young had been doing since day one, and he grabbed the reins effortlessly. Long before grunge ever hit it big and had a mainstream audience Neil was creating feedback drenched anti-solo'd disillusionment exorcisms, in fact as soon as grunge actually "hit" Neil imediately backed off and did a James Taylor style lite-folk record, which pretty much proves Neil was legit and wasn't latching on to any trends. It's pretty staggering really, for a guy who grew up listening to Roy Orbison to have been so on the edge in the early 90s. In 89-91 Neil was as relevant and innovative as anybody else in music. Sonic Youth was opening for him and they were kind of tame compared to Neil! (Case in point, Arc is more of a pure noise record than anything Sonic Youth has ever done).

 

[aeroplane]

I can't help myself! I feel this way about most bands! I like change in music and I always feel a band just gets better as they get more comfortable in their songwriting and their place in music. Sometimes they sound more mainstream as a result but I think this is more of a result of tighter songwriting and more of a sense of what they want than anything else. I get more disappointed in a band if they keep trying to capture their hit formula than anything!

For Aerosmith I found Nine Lives to be a great experimentation in Indian sounds, some country and still have their blues elements and great ballads. One of their best works period IMO!

About Nine Lives, Hole In My Soul was a KILLER song. Had to say it.

My favorite era of Aerosmith was the Rock in a Hard Place/Done With Mirrors period, but even today I think Aerosmith still produces at least one or two good songs per album. Permanent Vacation, Pump, Get a Grip, Nine Lives, Just Push Play.......they all had one or two good songs an album.

This opinion might make me about as popular around here as a traffic jam, but personally I loved the 1980's ZZ Top albums with the electronic sound they used for four straight albums before abandoning it in the mid 90's. I always thought it was miles better than anything they did before or since.

 

[Gabble Ratchet]

Oh Genesis definitely. Their debut was pure 60's psychadelic pop. They then were incredibly influential in the prog scene of the 70's before changing to a more electronic sound in the late 70's, and after being reduced to a trio, power popped it for the 80's. Then after realising their prog fans were aching after a decade of this 80's music (Even though I think it's quite brilliant) attempted another prog album, which was a gem completely discredited because of another, final line up change!

 

[R. Evans]

Yes went from this

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to this tripe!

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[LG]

I like 90125 myself RE.

David Bowie comes to mind, he is all over the map over his career. Prog/art/glam/dance...hard to think of something he has not tried over the years. I didn't really like him too much when I was younger, but about five years ago picked up most of his early recordings, they are Bowie at his very best.

 

[aeroplane]

My favorite Yes album was Talk and generally the long-time fans consider guitarist Trevor Rabin the worst thing to ever happen to Yes, so that says all anyone here needs to know.

 

[Magic]

how about a source of controversy in another thread, Alice Cooper. He has been all over the genre charts, too.
Hard rock, shock rock, glam rock, metal....Very diverse career.

 

[TheFeldster]

You can't overlook artists such as Paul McCartney, Sting and Billy Joel who have all released classical/baroque music, of all things:

Despite not being a classical lover by any means, I really respect the way these artists are willing to try their hand at a style of artistry which I'd imagine would be much harder to achieve than anything The Beatles, The Police or any contemporary band has done.

 

[AboutAGirl]

Talk's the Yes record from 1994, right? I like that one. It was soft but it was still heady and I think it fits in well with other thngs that classic rock artists were doing at the time like Division Bell, Wildflowers, Walking Into Clarksdale. Hell even Neil Young was relatively subdued at the time, with the gorgeous Sleeps With Angels record.

Here's another roots-deserter for your approval folks... CAT POWER! I just discoverd Cat Power after refusing to listen to her based on the assumption that she was another artist I wouldn't be able to stand ala Joanna Newsom et al. But I found out she actually was freaking bloody INCREDIBLE in the 1990s.



I mean HOLY SHIT! I couldn't BELIEVE this when I heard it. Her first 3 albums are freaking masterpieces. Didn't take me long to find out that our beloved Chan Marshall (AKA Cat Power) took a u-turn shortly after that into softy, absent-minded Joanna Newsom territory though.

Honestly, I'm not even going to lie to you guys, I've never heard anything she did after her third record. It's a conscious choice. I've read tens of reviews that fans of her later work have written about her early work... and they tell me more than I need to know. They call her early records unfocused gibberish, raw mush, so I know that whatever Cat's done to make these people fans of her later stuff must not be anything I want to hear! Even if her later stuff is great, that's not a risk I'm willing to take. I don't believe it's worth it. Because if her later stuff isn't great, it might tarnish this unbelievable music. It's not as though I can pretend the later stuff doesn't exist, it's purely mechanical: If I hear her later stuff, I'm afraid I'll start to hear echoes of it in her early stuff.