Quote:
Originally Posted by blastingas10
AIC is a fairly diverse band, I think. Take their first album, "facelift", it's a pretty heavy album. Then take a song like "don't follow", which is pretty folky - a darker, heavier folk sound. And then there's the song "swing on this", which has a somewhat jazzy bass line and guitar solo. They were the most diverse of any of the bands.
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How do you figure?
Led Zeppelin is a fairly diverse band, I think. Take their first album, "Led Zeppelin 1", it's a pretty heavy album. Then take a song like "Black Mountainside", which is pretty folky - a darker, heavier folk sound. And then there's the song "How Many More Times", which has a somewhat jazzy base line and guitar solo. They were the most diverse of any of the bands.
Really though, how original or diverse does that REALLY seem?
Compare that to something like Ultramega OK by Soundgarden. Quite frankly one of the most amazing full length debuts I've ever heard. Diversity? You've got songs in time signatures that have rarely been heard in the mainstream ever. Almost as many bass leads are there are guitar solos and subliminal subversion with purposely reversed 'evil' tracks (which AiC replicated years later on Dirt while completely missing the joke).
The followup 'Louder than Love' refined the debut into an ever darker and more cohesive disc. Rather than sounding familiar the cleaner production allows the instrumentation to create even more challenging rhythms and lets the band focus the darkness of its mood even more. All while still managing to stick a hilarious dig at the typical mainstream rock acts of the day who's main focus seemed to be trying to find the most obvious ways to indirectly say exactly what Cornell screams throughout the chorus of Big Dumb Sex.
Badmotorfinger sees a new bass player entering the fold and rather than having the band adopt a more traditional style like its contemporaries, Ben Shepherd established a playing style even more unique than Hiro Yamamoto's where he spends the majority of the time playing higher register notes on the bass throughout the entirety of songs. Thereby creating a rather unique aural dynamic where the melodic rhythm of the bass takes sonic precedence over the guitar within the scope of band, counter to the traditional roles of the instrument within their setting but still maintaining that impression by not actually adopting a lead role.
Superunknown was a mainstream smash success. After a decade of busting your ass, would you still really want to work for peanuts? If anything I've always felt Superunknown was a revisit to their debut. Same moods, ideas, just more experience and knowledge leading to a wider array of tricks and techniques to recreate a superior representation of their origin.
Down on the Upside showcases a tired band going through the motions as lead by a single creative individual testing the waters to his own solo career. Unfortunate but hardly unexpected.
I'm not really sure what I'm getting at here besides the fact that I greatly prefer Soundgarden over the rest. That, and diversity as measured by deviating from the mainstream by the same rate as a predecessor did in the past isn't really diverse.