So, Metallica released their first single for the new album, and depending who you ask The Day That Never Comes is either brilliant return to glory or utter crap. It started me thinking on artists, their style and the necessity of reinventing the sound every once in a while.
When CMX started, A. W. Yrjänä was an angry young man, member of Terveet Kädet, and their music reflected the HC punk past, combined with shamanism, religious concepts and obvious intellect - or at least resemblance of it. The music as a whole pretty soon evolved something more complicated, but in some ways also easier to digest. It was enough to make the band change label. Every album since has had it's own sound, and Talvikuningas was, at least according to some comments by the band, motivated to some extent by the need to do something different "since no one else will". But even today every gig has a set of people that'd like to hear only the aggressive punk melodies from the early days.
YUP has similar roots, and even though it may have stayed more true to its origins when playing on clubs, the albums have introduced a variety of styles from punk to simple, acoustic sounds and more complicated, almost symphonic instrumental weaves. The gigs are typically a blend of their entire career from the very early days to most recent developments.
These are Finnish examples, but it's the same with Metallica: it started from thrash, honed it to perfection, and then turned into something completely different. That change also turned them truly popular, which is of course a bad thing. Later they've experimented with other styles with varying success, but all the same, they've managed to keep their own and the audience's interest up.
I think that evolution is a key to lasting success. Even though the hardcore fans always seem to favor the early material, who would really want their favorite artist to stay the same? Something like Motörhead sounds the same to me from year to year, but it might be just that I haven't listened to them enough - would any artist really want to set their sound in stone and repeat the same clichés until the bitter end?
Think about The Beatles. Would we remember them as we do, if they'd just done All My Loving and I Saw Her Standing There and then rested on their laurels? No Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, forget about Let It Be. Those are wonderful pop tunes of their day, but my guess they would've been forgotten a long time ago.
When CMX started, A. W. Yrjänä was an angry young man, member of Terveet Kädet, and their music reflected the HC punk past, combined with shamanism, religious concepts and obvious intellect - or at least resemblance of it. The music as a whole pretty soon evolved something more complicated, but in some ways also easier to digest. It was enough to make the band change label. Every album since has had it's own sound, and Talvikuningas was, at least according to some comments by the band, motivated to some extent by the need to do something different "since no one else will". But even today every gig has a set of people that'd like to hear only the aggressive punk melodies from the early days.
YUP has similar roots, and even though it may have stayed more true to its origins when playing on clubs, the albums have introduced a variety of styles from punk to simple, acoustic sounds and more complicated, almost symphonic instrumental weaves. The gigs are typically a blend of their entire career from the very early days to most recent developments.
These are Finnish examples, but it's the same with Metallica: it started from thrash, honed it to perfection, and then turned into something completely different. That change also turned them truly popular, which is of course a bad thing. Later they've experimented with other styles with varying success, but all the same, they've managed to keep their own and the audience's interest up.
I think that evolution is a key to lasting success. Even though the hardcore fans always seem to favor the early material, who would really want their favorite artist to stay the same? Something like Motörhead sounds the same to me from year to year, but it might be just that I haven't listened to them enough - would any artist really want to set their sound in stone and repeat the same clichés until the bitter end?
Think about The Beatles. Would we remember them as we do, if they'd just done All My Loving and I Saw Her Standing There and then rested on their laurels? No Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, forget about Let It Be. Those are wonderful pop tunes of their day, but my guess they would've been forgotten a long time ago.
