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| Sunday, September 5, 2004 03:56 PM |
| All downhill from here |
 by Fëanor |
I was thinking about an interesting phenomenon in music tonight. It's fair to say that the majority of bands, if they're around for a few albums, get better as they go on. Most times a first album tends to have a different kind of sound--derivative, perhaps--and the band doesn't really find its own sound or get its legs until the next couple albums. (EDIT: In fact, the careers of most bands that hang around for a lot of albums tend to take the form of an arc of quality--not so good at first, then excellent in the middle, and then really bad at the end. Take Genesis, for instance. And then there are some bands that just suck their entire careers. Like Rush.)
But there are some bands that do their best work in their first albums, and then it's all downhill from there. I came up with a few bands that I think this is true of: Pearl Jam ("Ten"), Led Zeppelin ("I"--which isn't to say all their other albums aren't awesome, too; it's just that the first one is the best, in my opinion), REM ("Murmor""Murmur"--oops). Poppy gave me the idea for that last one, even though she disagrees with me. She suggested Live ("Mental Jewelry"), but I disagree with her there--I think "Throwing Copper" is their best album. She also mentioned The Spin Doctors ("Pocketful of Kryptonite"), which I think is a good example. And she said Fleetwood Mac, if you count the "true" existence of Fleetwood Mac beginning at "Rumours," but About.com says that was the band's 11th album (!), so maybe that's an unfair example. Another example she thought of was Counting Crows ("August and Everything After"). She's probably right about that, although I like a lot of their albums quite a bit.
Can anybody else think of a band that was around for at least a few albums, but whose first album is their best? (Bands that only made one album don't count.) |
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