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

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  (#1) Guns N' Roses 'Chinese Democracy'

  By the time Guns N' Roses released Chinese Democracy, there'd been years and years of speculation as to when it would be released. There'd also been an enormous amount of money spent to make the album happen, which created major buzz surrounding it. While it did fairly well commercially when it was released 17 years after production began, it received mixed reviews critically.

  Perhaps the biggest problem with Chinese Democracy is the fact that the band was completely new aside from singer Axl Rose - meaning that the signature Slash riffs that made the band massive stars were nowhere to be found. The band took the lack of Slash and ran with it, changing their sound in the process. 

  "The problem is when one member of a given band, who wasn’t even the main man responsible for its initial success, gets to run around unchecked and impose his musical will on others," one review of the album stated. 
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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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  (#3) Queen + Paul Rodgers 'The Cosmos Rock'

  Queen fronted by anyone other than Freddie Mercury needs to be extremely cautious about what they do in terms of original output. They seemed to throw any caution to the wind when they recorded The Cosmos Rocks with Bad Company's Paul Rodgers, which proved extremely unsuccessful for many reasons. It found the band sounding closer to Rodgers' own music than the music of Queen, which doesn't yield very interesting results compared to Queen's back catalog.

  The idea of reinventing Queen musically just didn't land with critics, who mostly rejected the project.

  "The songs might have sounded less awful if they were delivered with a certain knowing camp, a grandiloquence that suggested a sense of the ridiculous. But Paul Rodgers' stock in trade is a kind of pained sincerity," one review stated. 
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  (#4) Aerosmith 'Just Push Play'

  Aerosmith had a hit with "Jaded," off of 2001's Just Push Play, but the majority of the album wasn't quite as well-received and became a particularly negative mark on the band's record to that point. An article analyzing the album explained the reason for its lackluster reviews was due to the band's attempts to change things up stylistically. 

  "The negative reaction was caused by the fact that the band experimented with some modern elements which resulted in accusations by the band’s hardcore fans that Aerosmith had completely sold out," the article read, pointing to Steven Tyler's attempt at rapping throughout the album as one of the main factors in overall failure of the album. 
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  (#5) Bon Jovi 'Lost Highway'

  An attempt to ride the success of their country-influenced duet single "Who Says You Can't Go Home" with Sugarland's Jennifer Nettles, 2007 saw Bon Jovi release the forgettable Lost Highway - which went all in on the country sound they'd dabbled in. The New Jersey rock icons were so eager for lightening to strike twice that they even included two duets on Lost Highway, with country superstars Big & Rich and LeAnne Rimes.

  One review of the album was particularly scathing, calling "We Got It Going On," the Big & Rich collaboration, "heinous musically, morally and spiritually, from its doom-mongering bass line and talk-box guitar to its pilfered lyrics." 

  Though the album succeeded commercially, the band returned to their rock roots for their next album and abandoned their efforts to cross over to country. 
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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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  (#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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  (#8) Starship

  Jefferson Starship was the continuation of Jefferson Airplane, which then morphed into Starship, which then had a massive hit with "We Built This City." The song was an attempt to revitalize and reimagine Grace Slick and company, but it didn't stand the test of time despite it being shoved down the world's collective throat upon its initial release.

  The most fascinating thing about the song was that it was written by a series of songwriters over a long period of time before finally reaching its final composition stage. Years later, the song is widely accepted as almost hilariously bad despite its commercial success. Even the band themselves despises it. Slick, years after its release, called the song "awful."

  "I felt like I'd throw up on the front row, but I smiled and did it anyway. The show must go on," she said. 
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  (#9) INXS 'Switch'

  INXS' attempt to revitalize their career after the death of frontman Michael Hutchens was well-documented in the reality show Rockstar: INXS. That show brought them singer JD Fortune, who admittedly stepped into a band that relied so heavily on its iconic vocalist that there was virtually no way he'd ever be fully accepted. 

  Switch was the new INXS trying to bring themselves back into the fold with a new singer - something that always has mixed results. Unfortunately it didn't work very well, with many critics expressing lukewarm opinions about the new version of INXS. 
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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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  (#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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  (#12) U2 'Pop'

  U2's 1997 album Pop was a major departure for the Irish group, who were on top of the world at the time thanks to the success of their late 80s and early 90s releases such as the Grammy-nominated Achtung Baby. The Pop album attempted to bridge the gap between electronic music and the band's own brand of rock, but didn't quite land with listeners. Despite the massive stadium tour that accompanied it, the album didn't sell as well as expected and the band themselves weren't particularly happy with the finished product.

  In an interview years later, Bono expressed disappointment with the album - saying that he wished they could've spent more time on it.

  "I always think if we'd just had another month, we could have finished it," he told the Chicago Tribune. "It didn't communicate the way it was intended to." 
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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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  (#14) Hootie & The Blowfish 'Musical Chairs'

  In 1998, Hootie & the Blowfish were moving along at a much slower and less hyper pace than they were just three years earlier. Following the "failure" of their 1996 sophomore album Fairweather Johnson, which itself followed their 16 million-selling 1994 debut Cracked Rear View, the band emerged with their third album Musical Chairs. It was meant to be a stylistic evolution and departure for the group, incorporating elements of bluegrass and R&B, but audiences weren't buying the re-branded Hootie. 

  "'I Will Wait,' the album’s first single, sounds an awful lot like the hits from the first Hootie album, all of which sounded pretty much alike themselves," one review stated. 

  The album managed to go platinum, but a change in sound was not enough to prevent full-on Hootie burnout in the mainstream and the band never quite recovered. 
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  (#15) Linkin Park 'Minutes To Midnight'

  Linkin Park has changed their sound numerous times over the years, but never more drastically than their 2007 album Minutes To Midnight. The album was a follow-up to their successful sophomore release, which was true to the rap-rock and nu-metal sound that made them stars.

  On Minutes To Midnight, however, the group attempted a drastic musical restructuring that included rapper Mike Shinoda on just two songs. One review on AllMusic called the album "quiet, atmospheric stuff, dabbling with electronic textures that were cutting edge in 1996 but sound passé now." 

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