Now, I can kinda understand a band having ONE great album, and then immediately going to shit. It makes more sense than turning to complete crap after several albums. They spend years playing and perfecting the songs that go on that album, so they SHOULD be good songs. They certainly get enough practice with them, enough time to fine-tune them into something decent. But then they have to deal with the pressure of following up a successful first album, and they can�t take years to do it, but instead have a few months after touring for the first album to write and record another. Otherwise the attention-span challenged nimrods populating our society will forget about them, so I can understand when that album sucks.
What I have trouble with is when a band has a whole string of great albums, that millions of people love, and they then inexplicably change their musical style, or somesuch bullshit, leading to all kinds of suck.
Take a band like Queensryche. The first album, which was actually just an EP, fucking RULES! Seriously great stuff. And the second and third albums were really good follow-ups. Then came Operation:Mindcrime, which is nothing short of pure fucking genius, followed by Empire, which was also great stuff, which the exception of the abysmal Silent Lucidity, which pretty much sucked as much ass as one song could. Those two albums in particular were immensely popular as well as being good, so there were high hopes, naturally, for the next effort from the band, Promised Land.
Perhaps those hopes were too high, because that album blows goat. I still don�t understand how a band can change so completely so suddenly. It blows my mind, as well as saddens me that a once-great band has chosen to suck. But however bad this album was, it looks like a masterpiece compared to what followed.
Which leads us to another problem. I can also understand a band having one �off� album; one album that doesn�t quite live up to the rest of them. Even the greatest band in the world, Kiss did that with Unmasked. That album is fucking terrible, and spawned what is one of the WORST songs in history, Shandi. If I NEVER hear that audio trash again it will be too soon. I would rather give myself a home vasectomy with a bottle of gin and a dull, rusty pair of scissors than listen to that particular song once more in my life. But they did get back on track after that album, so it�s not so bad, and they don�t fit into what I am talking about here today.
And now we get to it, the reason for writing this in the first place. I was talking with a friend at work a while ago, and we came up with a great idea. Every time one of these bands decides they want to completely change what they sound like, which basically means go from a good band to recorded suck, they should also change the name of the band, so as not to confuse people.
Like going back to the Queensryche example. When they released the Promised Land album, they should have changed the name of the band to Skid Mark. This way, people wouldn�t have to qualify their answer when they were asked if they liked Queensryche. �Do you like Queensryche?� �Yes, up to Promised Land. That and everything after it sucked. I can�t believe how far downhill that band went.� But if they had changed their name with that album, and on all subsequent releases, this could have been avoided, and the answer to the question would be much simpler. �Do you like Queensryche?� �Yup. They rock.� See how easy that is? And then it could be followed, or not depending on the person asking, by, �Do you like Skid Mark?� �Fuck no. Those guys suck donkey balls.�
Or a band like Metallica. They had three great albums, the first three. After Master of Puppets they should have changed their name to Dog Pile, because everything they released after that album showed less musical ability than a pile of dog shit. The same is true for Van Halen, the stuff after Dave left was absolute crap, and they should have called themselves Diseased Scrotum.
Seriously, have you listened to any of the stuff these guys have released since Master of Puppets? It�s pure, unadulterated shit. Enter Sandman is crap. Everything off �And Justice For All blows more goat than the loneliest shepherd in history. Sad But True, Unforgiven, Wherever I May Roam. These songs all sucks ass. The one song on the black album that isn�t crap, and is actually pretty good, is The God That Failed. I�m pretty sure that had to have been written for an earlier album, or by another band. And I�m not even gonna mention anything AFTER the black album, cuz it�s all worse than shit.
I could go on and on about bands like this, since there seems to be a lot of them out there that do this shit. But I won�t. I think you get the picture here. I don�t really care about how these guys want to �stretch as artists� or any of that crap. Put out more of the music you�re good at. You wanna do something different? Go put out some godawful solo album like Gene Simmons did. He didn�t ruin Kiss with his idiocy and sense of self-importance. Stop fucking up bands that people like just to please yourselves.
I�d love to imagine a world where this trend stops, and music doesn�t suck anymore, or at least you know whether or not it�s going to suck just by looking at the name of the artist, but I doubt very highly that this is going to happen. So I�ll just sit here and listen to my Queensryche albums, and not buy any of the stuff from Skid Mark.
Cuz they suck ass.