Some bands can successfully try just about anything. R.E.M. went from the jangly sound of “Radio Free Europe” to the country ballad “Don’t Go Back To Rockvil” to the pure pop “Stand”. The Kinks had the hard “You Really Got Me” and the gentle, beautiful “Waterloo Sunset” (one of my favorite rock songs).
OK, neither of those examples are particularly good. Which is where y’all come in: Which bands really can or could do just about anything? The only restrictions are that failed experiments don’t count (‘failure’ defined as being crappy) and the band must have substantially the same personnel through all the changes mentioned.
Yeah, exactly. From really hard metal early to operatic stuff to folk to disco to calypso to rockabilly to power pop to science fiction (almost filk-like) to piano bar blues to a cappela to a sort of mariachi thing to synth-pop to a 1920s thing.
I’d also offer up Genesis, as well as David Bowie, as two groups/artists that have a pretty broad range (though with Genesis that is in part to lineup changes).
The first three bands I thought of have already been mentioned.
The Beatles—their range and versatility were part of what made them the Beatles and made Sgt. Pepper such a big deal.
The Kinks had a wider range and covered more styles than what the OP mentioned.
And the case has already been made for Queen.
This thread must, however, include a mention of Weird Al Yankovic’s band, who are called upon to play pretty much every style of popular music under the sun, either straight or polkafied, and make it sound as good as the original.
But a few years ago, I heard Chris Stein make a pretty good argument that Blondie had shown more range than almost any group since the Beatles. They did hard New Wave rock, of course, but also reggae (“Tide Is High”) and rap (“Rapture”) and disco (“Heart of Glass”).
Outkast have done straight up Southern Rap, G-funk-esque mid '90s hip hop, avant garde futurism, pop-rock, drum ‘n’ bass, funk, soul, R&B and have made a few middling to bad stabs at blues, jazz and musical theatre. They’re the best nomination here, except for perhaps Blondie.
[ul]
[li]Early hard rock (initial singles)[/li][li]Beatlesque '60s Britpop (Face to Face, etc.)[/li][li]Music hall/country western (Muswell Hillbillies)[/li][li]Rock theater-- with accompanying stage shows (Schoolboys in Disgrace, etc.)[/li][li]Baroque pop (Sleepwalker)[/li][li]Hard rock (Give the People What They Want, etc.)[/li][li]AOR/adult contempo (Think Visual, etc.)[/li][/ul]
Plus Dave Davies’ heavy metal and prog solo work. Being a Kinks fan can be a schizophrenic experience.
Ulver has to be a contender. They started out as a black metal band, did a folk album, and then got into electronic music. After that, they played around with techno, industrial, ambient and noise for a while. Their latest album contains passages of doom metal, pop, jazz, classical and various electronic bits that I don’t know how to classify.
I’d say Jethro Tull. Some of their range is due to personnel changes, especially between the first and second albums, but most was due to Ian Anderson’s very wide-ranging interests. So they did blues, hard rock, a bit of baroque, tender ballads, concept albums, folkie stuff, and a lot more. The quality of the material could vary widely, but even at their worst I think they were pretty good.
Anderson and Barre still maintain the band, but I haven’t kept up with them for a number of years.
Can there really be any competition for Frank Zappa? Doo-wop, avant-garde classical, psychedelic rock, free jazz, musique concrete, ground-breaking synthesizer compositions, hard rock, pop, extended guitar heroics, forays into C&W, rap, faux-Broadway, and even a one-off album of 18th century chamber music (composed by namesake Francesco Zappa).
I was thinking Zappa, but the OP is more about bands with a steady lineup. While Zappa had a core of players for whatever phase he was in, I wouldn’t really classify his collection of musical entities as a “band”. Maybe the Mothers of Invention.
While Queen and some of the others were superb at performing well in a variety of established genres, the Beatles’ music always seemed to me unique to them (covers excepted, of course). They were making new music like no one else was making and each album was different than the ones that preceded it. Their music is so ubiquitous and has been around so long now that to many people it sounds the same; but at the time everyone I knew was amazed at the way their music evolved from album to album.
Extremely talented and musical guys, these guys were.
