Preach it Payton’s Servant.
Elvis Costello - he’s ranged across a great number of modern musical styles with quite a bit of success in doing so.
Joe Jackson started out as new wavish pop and made his way then to much more orchestrated music.
The Jam started out doing stripped down rock and became much more soulful as they went on.
Talkingheads became known for playing minimalist quirky rock and by their fourth album had strongly incorporated african rythyms into their sound.
Paul Simon has also had a great deal of success using different styles.
How about Jethro Tull? They started as blues band. By Aqualung, they were doing progressive hard rock theme albums. In the late 70’s, they were doing folksy prog. As they entered the 80’s, the took on synthesizers. Since Crest of a Knave in the late 80’s, they haven’t really stuck with a genre for more than one album.
The band I thought of when I saw the thread title was Poi Dog Pondering. They began as a folk-rolk (I guess that’s what it’s called) all-acoustic group and then gradually transformed into house music (I guess that’s what it’s called). They had me until their live album.
More or less. Rough (very rough) guideline:
Ska (No Doubt)
Pop-ska (Beacon Street)
Punk-ska (Tragic Kingdom)
Rock-punk-electronic (Saturn)
Electronic (Rock Steady)
The Mekons started off as one of the most amateurish of punk bands. In the early 1980s they moved into weird synth-pop experimentalism (see “Devils, Rats and Piggies”/“The Mekons”), before becoming a country band in the mid 1980s (despite coming from Yorkshire, England). Since then, they’ve dallied in a folk-punk thing (“The Curse of the Mekons”) with rock and pop excursions.
Someone already mentioned Lou Reed. With the Velvet Underground, he went from art-school pop (most of “The Velvet Underground and Nico”) to a more punky experimentalism (mainly “White Light/White Heat”) to very sweet pop-folk (“The Velvet Underground”). Solo, “Transformer” was glam with soul and jazz influences; “Berlin” was prog rock; “Metal Machine Music” was avant-garde guitar freak-out drone; and in the early 1980s he dabbled in synth-pop before returning with the straighforward rock of “New York”. Since then he’s done more weirdness. (Meanwhile John Cale has done prog rock in the early 1970s, lounge-singer style stuff around 1980, synth-pop with Eno in the late 1980s, and stuff which is pretty much modern classical.)
The Stone Roses went from Byrds-style guitar-pop to dancey stuff to Led Zep-esque rock. And Primal Scream started as a C86 fey jangly guitar band (“Velocity Girl”), before a dance music diversion (“Loaded”, “Come Together”), rock (“Rocks”) and their recent dub-punk sound (“Swastika Eyes” etc).
Oh look, it just was.
I think the Clash qualify on the basis of their Sandinista! album alone. They did a more than a half dozen styles of music on just this one album.
Granted, it was a triple LP, but on it you have:
Reggae/Ska (too many to list)
Jazz (Look Here, Broadway)
Rockabilly (The Leader)
Rap (The Magnificent Seven, Lightning Strikes)
Bubblegum pop (Hitsville U.K.)
Disco (Ivan Meets G.I. Joe)
Waltz (Rebel Waltz)
Gospel (Corner Soul, The Sound of the Sinners)
Calypso (Let’s Go Crazy, Washington Bullets)
Heck, they even managed to include one punk rock song …
And how 'bout when he hosted WHAT’S MY LINE? That was a whole differrent style!
Depeche Mode. They started out as an electronic dance band, progressively improving until they reached their apogee with Violator, then went artsy and obsessive with Songs of Faith and Devotion (IMHO their best album), then went gothic with Ultra and now largely do love songs and little bits on how good everything is–which is the impression I get from Exciter. Great band.
I’m a bit surprised nobody’s mentioned Queen yet. While overplayed, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a nice nutshell of how they changed styles from song to song on albums (and in this case within a song).