This past Friday, I picked up Phoenix’s excellent new album Bankrupt!, and I’ve been playing it to death ever since. After hearing that the album would be more experimental than 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, the album that turned me onto the band in the first place (yes yes, you’re cooler than me because you got into them with Alphabetical, spare me), I was intrigued but a bit nervous. While experimentation always sounds great on paper, too many bands ruin things by messing with the formula. It’s important to avoid total creative stagnation, but sometimes more of the same is just what the doctor ordered.
Luckily for me, the experimentation on Phoenix’s new album turned out to be rather overstated. yes, they try some new things, but mostly, it’s full of the same catchy choruses and dreamy keyboards that drove their earlier. Phoenix was the rare band that experimented just enough to keep their music from growing stale, without losing the dynamics that brought people on board in the first place.
But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the notion of “branching out” is highly overrated. Tons of bands have succeeded by sticking to a consistent sound over the years. Look at AC/DC, The Ramones, and Motorhead. None of these bands changed much of anything in their sound over many years together, and it never hurt them. It never turned off the fans, and no band lost a great deal of critical respect as a result.
More importantly, the one time The Ramones did come under critical fire was when they did try to change things up a bit. 1979’s End Of The Century was produced by Phil Spector, who attempted to add his trademark Wall of Sound to what the Ramones were doing, and it didn’t really work. The album is still respected on the strength of the individual songs, but many agree that the Ramones would have been better had they kept the formula of the first four albums intact.
It’s always amusing to me when bands get criticized for continuing to do the same thing, when the thing they’re doing just happens to be awesome. Look at The Strokes; when Room On Fire came out in 2003, it was criticized for being overly similar to Is This It. there’s just one problem with that: everyone loved Is This It! What was wrong with a second helping. Personally, I actually think Room On Fire is a stronger record anyway because it’s more consistently memorable, but that’s a whole other discussion.
The point is, bands don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every single thing they put out. Some bands can try something new on every album, while others a better off sticking to a more consistent formula, and that’s fine. Instead of criticizing bands for staying in their comfort zones, we should praise them for creating such a pleasurable zone in the first place.
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