**That **I can agree with!
Boz Scaggs. Lost me for good with “Silk Degrees.”
Which inspired one of my very favorite Onions bits ever.
I could only listen to the first two Gang of Four albums. I mean, sure, they set the bar high with Entertainment and Solid Gold, but man did they fall well short with everything afterwords, especially the execrable Hard and Mall. (I could just about tolerate Songs of the Free.) But I’m not sure if I should count them, as they kind of disbanded after their fourth studio album, Hard, and Mall was kind of an ill-advised reunion album. (At least that’s how I view it.)
Crap, sorry for three in a row. I just re-read the thread. I should probably hold off on Gang of Four as I’m not sure whether it counts as a stylistic shift. The music got more dancey and produced, but might not quite qualify under the terms of the OP.
This is what I was coming in to post.
Frank Black (a/k/a Black Francis):
Everything he did with The Pixies: A++
His first two solo releases (Frank Black and Teenager of the Year): A+++ (I know that’s blasphemy to my fellow Pixies fans, but there’s not one subpar track on either of those albums, and I still play them often)
Third (final) solo album (Cult of Ray): A
First three releases by Frank Black & The Catholics (FBATC, Pistolero, Dog In The Sand): A+
After that he went all Americana Rock and I lost interest. Nothing even A-rated in the last ten years (although, admittedly, I did stop actively buying his stuff so I could be missing something). The Frank Black Francis album was an enjoyable throwback, but only as a novelty.
Now that the Pixies are back together (hard to believe it’s been 8 years now), I have conflicting feelings each time a rumor surfaces re: a new album from them… It could easily rock hard or suck hard.
Has anyone else noticed that this thread is full of *"… then they started trying to please someone else…" *(the radio audience, a reviewer, the record buyers, Sting’s mom)?
At least the ones that admit it (I think Gwen Stefani basically said she decided to be a pop star) have a teence more integrity. But look how many bands traded “what made them unique” for a fleeting outside chance at ‘a-medium-amount-of-fame’ or some cash?
But it’s so sad…
and worse when you see it coming, like a friend of mine who knew some of the guys in Chicago. Terry Kath died, and someone said something like “Okay, here’s where Cetera tries to get us to be a lounge band, so he can croon.”
Yup.
After Joshua Tree they lost me.
Does even “New York City Hotel Blues” strike you that way?
With the possible exception of Scarlet’s Walk, Tori Amos after Boys for Pele.
Oh yes. This actually exemplifies my point. Listen to that track - it’s a mess. There’s so much unnecessary distortion and buzzing that what would be an okay middling rock track is just bland rock-by-numbers. It’s almost like even at the highest quality it’s being transmitted through an fm reciever and our connection’s not that good. Which could conceivably work, if it was working towards some effect in the song. It’s not. And the whole album is like that. It reminds me of when Dashboard Confessional went ‘electric’ and it was really just him playing ostensibly acoustic rifts and progressions but with a bit of feedback on. It’s not a good use of the instrument, and if you’re going to focus on it as much as Margot obviously did during recording, it creates a different tone which in this case produces mixed results.
Compare **New York City Hotel Blues ** to early bittersweet tracks like Broadripple is Burning, Skeleton Key, Quiet as a Mouse, hell I’ll even throw in something like My Baby Shoots Her Mouth Off - not a great song (although it’s decent) but certainly of that haunted style that they debuted with and that I loved. Buzzard is itself an okay album, but in my opinion its light years away in terms of both style and absolute quality from the dreamy, intriguing songs they used to play.
Yeah…I think we just like different things about Margot. While I do love “Skeleton Key,” I don’t like the other two nearly as much as “A Children’s Crusade on Acid” and “Pages Written on a Wall” which “NYCHB” reminds me more of…from my play count I’ve played them both (and Skeleton Key too) 10x as often as either “Broadripple is Burning” or “Quiet as a Mouse.”
PJ Harvey after Is This Desire?. And I feel a little disloyal for saying so, because on some level I do detachedly appreciate the music she’s making now (especially her last album, Let England Shake) (like, I’m glad it exists in the world, even if I don’t like it). But I loved her second, third, and fourth albums so much because she stood as such a powerful figure in the stories her songs told, and her voice was so strong and dauntless, and she wasn’t afraid of sounding ugly and off-putting for effect. Then Uh Huh Her happened and…man, I don’t even know. What happened to the musician that late I loved?
The Beatles. Their first couple of albums were rock-and-roll greatness. Then they got into drugs and flushed themselves down the toilet.
Bonnie Raitt. Love her older stuff. Then later in her career she got off drugs and cut way back on alcohol. She achieved more widespread popularity, but she lost me.
A lot of people are ignoring the “changed styles” part of the OP.
The question isn’t “At what point did a musician/group you used to like jump the shark?”*
Black Sabbath, for instance, never changed their style, they just lost whatever it was that made them great.
*Go ahead, if there isn’t already a thread covering that question…
I dig it.
Leann Rimes decided to go pop for a while, as did Faith Hill. They both have country voices that sound decidedly better in a country setting.
Gospel tenor singer David Phelps of the Gaither Vocal Band decided to do an album or two of Contemporary Christian music. And while they weren’t bad music, his strong suit is definitely in his gospel. His amazing voice seemed wasted in a CCM setting that didn’t challenge it.
I came in to say this same thing. Trick of the tail was the last good one, although I also think PG needed to leave when he did. The music that Tony Banks wrote for Lamb was, well, frantic… perhaps in an effort to keep up with what Gabriel had accomplished lyrically?