WHEN SWITCHING STYLES PAYS OFF WRITTEN BY BEN JAMIESON
‘I Hope You Suffer’ by AFI stands proudly at the top of my Spoitfy ‘On Repeat’ playlist. To say that I’m obsessed with this song would be an understatement. We’re having a spring wedding and we’ll both be wearing black. I love the song so much in fact, that I actually took time out to listen to the rest of the album. But I found myself disappointed when the rest of the album just wasn’t what I’d expected. The jump between ‘I Hope You Suffer’ and the song it precedes (‘A Deep Slow Panic’) is immense, switching dramatically between an awesome goth rock ballad and some kind of emo Two Door Cinema Club affair. As much as I’d have liked to, I just couldn’t get behind the rest of the album. This ultimately got me thinking, which other bands have had their most major stylistic departures become their most popular singles? In 1997, Blur released their fifth studio album named simply Blur. In an effort to revitalise the band’s image, or as Graham Coxon said ‘make music that scared people again’, the band drew influence from American rock and grunge music. ‘Song 2’, the album’s headline single, was a far cry from the band’s former dreamy, storytelling based style. The song reached number two on the UK singles chart, and sixth on the US Billboard alternative music chart. Because of the records dramatic change in style, and because the album reached previously unseen success in the US, many American’s first exposure to Blur was a grunge parody entire unlike the rest of the band’s discography.
Green Day are known today as one of the most influential punk rock bands of all time. But one of their most well known songs, ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’, is as far from punk rock as a song could be. The second to last track on Nimrod, the band’s fourth and most varied album to date, the song is a melancholy ballad reflecting on the loss of a loved one. Although the band was rather well known at the time, it wasn’t until ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’ and the song’s use in a multitude of films and television series (most notably the finale of Seinfield) that Green Day was really thrown into superstardom. The story goes that KISS wrote ‘I Was Made For Lovin’ You’ entirely to prove that anyone could write a hit disco song, after mounting pressure from their producers to shift towards a more mainstream, easily marketable sound. Even more unlikely, the original demo was said to have been produced ‘within mere hours’. Maybe those stories are true, or maybe KISS just sold out, I’m certainly sure which one they’d rather you believe. The song would go on to sell over a million copies, and become the bands’ second Gold single. Although many fans still write the song off as a sign of the band selling out, it remains a concert regular, albeit with production that diminishes the disco aspects of the song.
