There are a lot of Blink-182 songs that sound very similar. They’ve got a pretty good formula for just cranking out filler for their albums that sounds good enough. Luckily for them, they also seem to be pretty damn successful just following that formula, with multiple popular singles off of their last few albums.
So who else has a good formula that just seems to be accepted by the masses? (and what’s the formula?)
Rocking all over the world ahh the Quo 
In the 70’s and early 80’s Status Quo rocked the world (don’t know about the States 
) with 3 chords. A lot of their songs where almost identical but once they started grinding your head starting rocking
They opened Live Aid BTW just incase you’re trying to place them
AC/DC
they continue the same hard edged rock n’ roll formula and it works for them!! lot of power chords and soloing, etc…
'NSYNC Not only is it working for them, but there are dozens of groups using the same thing and succeeding. The music may be crap, but the formula works.
Well, Matthew Sweet made the same album 3 times in a row and nobody called him on the carpet for it. It happened to work pretty damn well.
The Ramones had the concept, but I’m not a huge fan.
Steve Miller worked the same groove until it became a ditch.
Though some would like to spit at me for saying this, but Bad Religion is an awfully formulaic band. They’ve been playing the same song for years.
I think most grunge was just soft verse, loud harsh chorus, soft verse, loud harsh chorus, soft outro. Sure there are examples of songs that don’t follow the formula, but the vast majority did.
But Linkin Park holds the trophy for beating a dead horse with ONE album. They’re already predictable and boring. Hopefully, they will go away. Soon. Like now. please…
This was the first band I thought of when I read the title of this thread.
Long live AC/DC!
I’ll second Blink-182. Basically all those pop-punk bands have the same formula down pat. Which is also the case with pop-rock bands, most of whose hits have the same structure and chord progressions.
Disturbed’s another one. Their songs are good one at a time, but after about 2 you think your CD player’s on Repeat mode.
Limp Bizkit’s pretty bad. They always have to throw in a soft part with the echo-y vocal effects, and then build it into some thrashing. It was cool in Nookie, and then it just started to get repetitive.
I think Boston did pretty well with essentially the same song recorded multiple times on their first three albums.
True story. I was once at a girlfriend’s house and she had a CD by Erykah Badu. She put it on, and it had been playing for over an hour before we noticed it had ‘stuck’ repeating one track over and over. Which perhaps tells us something about how much variety we expected from that particular CD.
I think pretty much all the soft ‘soul’ artists have one formula that they just keep cranking out. If it’s a male vocal, it’s endless “Oooh baby I’m gonna do it so good for you” and if female either the same or the more market-sensitive passive version, “Oooh baby you do it so good for me”. As for the music underneath this pre-orgasmic warbling around the root chord, nothing that a competent studio engineer can’t fashion in about an hour’s work from available samples. The only variable is the quality of the voice and the marketing.
The ‘Status Quo only play three chords’ jibe is wearing a bit thin these days. Yes, they base most of their material around the 12 bar pattern, but (a) they have crafted a lot of variety from that seemingly restrictive palette and (b) they have occasionally tried out other sounds e.g. their track “Gerdundula”, which hardly anyone spots as a Quo track if they hear it for the first time.
Here in the UK, the appalling boy band ‘Westlife’ have shamelessly milked one formula without any pretence to doing anything else. (1) Choose a classic pop song (2) Sing a cover version over an anonymous studio backing track (3) Look good on the video for their army of teenage girl fans. They have had something like 10 number 1 singles in a row. There is no suggestion, whatsoever, that they will ever try to come up with any original material or ask anyone to do so on their behalf.
The Pogues. Just get licker’d up and start yelling at the mike.
A new song was always a drinking binge and an overnight stay in the local jail away.
Also almost every Fuel song I’ve heard on the radio starts off with the lead singer (Brett Scalien or something) singing over just an acoustic guitar part, and then the rest of the instruments come in all at once about 40 seonds or so later. I get tired of that one, too.
as far as formulae go, the Ramones are pretty much the masters of it.
Now, to take it to the next level, Catherine Wheel has a meta-formula…they copy other people’s formulas and do just as good or better at it. For instance, grunge with “crank” et al., and “sparks are gonna fly” with modern Rage Rock. Sparks are gonna fly is definitely better than any other Rage Rock song.
Then there’s Ween, who do the same thing, except its understood as a joke whereas Catherine Wheel probably think they are being creative.
Best formula???
Guess I’d have to say The Fibonaccis
But seriously, the Stones sure got a few miles out of theirs.
A lot of “blues rock” groups seem to have done the same set of material over and over for the last 25 years - from ZZ Top (hell, they even named an album “Recycler”), The Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood, and so on. But it’s still a lot of fun.
Kennedy commented on this once on 120 Minutes or Alternative Nation - said something to the effect of ‘Bad Religion keeps playing the same song, but it’s a damn good song!’
Ha! 
The Jesus Lizard were similar. 3 great musicians + one wild animal given a mic and thrown on-stage. God, I loved them.
I guess you could throw Motorhead in there, but some of us actually know one album from the next. The casual fan, or someone who heard them on the radio (yeah right) might not know the difference but I do.
…more likely it tells us how good the ganja is at ianzin’s girlfriend’s house.