Random Bands Tried To Change Their Sound But Failed (15 items)

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  (#10) The Beach Boys 'Still Cruisin''

  One review of the Beach Boys' spectacularly bad 1989 release Still Cruisin' summed the album up in two accurate words - rock bottom. Granted, it wasn't necessarily an album of all new songs and rather a repackaging of other songs under the guise that they'd been used in movies. It of course includes "Kokomo," and also features the cringe-inducing "Still Cruisin'" from the Lethal Weapon 2 soundtrack.

  It does feature some original songs and an attempt to stay relevant with a version of "Wipe Out" that featured a rap group. It was an uninspired, money-grabbing attempt at reinvention that is an embarrassing chapter in the Beach Boys saga. 
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  (#2) Snoop Dogg 'Reincarnated'

  In a curveball move that came in the middle of a hugely successful career and a growing legacy, Snoop Dogg emerged in 2013 under the name Snoop Lion and released Reincarnated, a reggae album that was intended as a reinvention for the rap superstar. 

  At the time, Snoop was exploring his commitment to Rastafarianism - which was questioned by the reggae legend Bunny Wailer and the Rastafari Millennium Council. Wailer called Snoop's reggae album and Rastafarian image "outright fraudulent.

  Music critics weren't buying it either, with one calling Snoop's rebranding "profoundly unconvincing and a bit insulting" in terms of its connection to the legacy of Rastafarian music.  
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  (#6) Fleetwood Mac 'Time'

  By 1995, Fleetwood Mac had become a shell of the group's heyday. Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham were long gone and the lineup was strange to say the list including Christine McVie, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, former Traffic guitarist Dave Mason, longtime Mac guitarist and Buckingham's replacement Billy Burnette, and new vocalist Bekka Bramlett.

  That lineup recorded the disastrous Time, which saw the band attempt to reach new stylistic ground. The results were not very memorable as one review in LA Weekly called it "dull, overwrought, overlong and occasionally dire." 

  Mason later explained that there were several factors in the album's failure, including a lack of enthusiasm from the label.

  "We did the album, and Warner Bros. didn’t really bother with it, frankly. So, it sort of just came out and died a death. And that was that," he told Something Else. "I could understand, from some people’s point of view, because the Rumours album obviously sold so many copies. It was so huge that that sort of overshadowed everything else."
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  (#13) Fall Out Boy 'Save Rock And Roll'

  When Fall Out Boy reformed in 2013 for Save Rock And Roll after several years apart, the door was wide open for them to either take their sound in a new direction or play it safe with songs that stayed true to their origins. They chose the former, and critics were not won over.

  "Does rock’s future depend on this overheated nonsense? Of course not," Rolling Stone wrote. 
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  (#11) Metallica 'Load'

  Metallica's attempts at reinvention have been derided by metal heads. Bolstered by the success of the Black Album, which saw the group strip down their sprawling metal jams into tight heavy rock, the metal giants attempted to branch out even further with their follow up albums. Load and Reload, a pair of stylistically similar albums originally intended to be a double album, were released in 1996 and 1997, respectively, and found the band incorporating southern rock and almost country-sounding influences.

  Neither album did very well, with Rolling Stone's lukewarm review politely calling them "stepping stones" in their legacy without directly praising either one. Even singer James Hetfield said he regretted the albums, explaining that he felt he was compromising to the vision of Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett.

  "The way that was looking, I wasn’t 100 percent on with it, but I would say that was a compromise," he later admitted to Clash magazine. 
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  (#7) Weezer 'Raditude'

  Weezer's early releases were praised as some of the finest alternative rock recorded, and the band has had to live up to those albums in the years that followed. Despite having several hits on mainstream charts, some of their later work showed an attempt to shift stylistically towards top 40 radio pop - and both critics and fans weren't going for it.

  The 2009 album Raditude was the most obvious example of Weezer abandoning the elements that made them so beloved in favor of staying on the charts. One unforgiving review in Slant described this period in Weezer history an "unpardonable decline into soulless streamlined pop-rock," and called the album "a thematically vacant and sonically uninspired collection of ditties tailor-made for mainstream radio" that "consistently fringes on unlistenable." 

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