13 bands or artists that didn’t find their signature sound until their second album
1. Alice In Chains - Debut ‘Facelift’ is a mixed bag, combing elements of grunge, alternative, sleaze rock, and funk metal. ‘Dirt’ saw them hit their stride
2. Metallica - Kill em All is a bunch of shit motorhead rip-offs and childish nonsense (no life til leather, folks). Ride the Lightning is on another level and with that, Metallica was truly born.
3. Pantera - Power Metal {actually their 4th album, but a huge change in style}
4. Mobb Deep - The Infamous... (1st album Juvenile Hell went completely unnoticed, genuinely no one cares about it, Infamous is a stoned cold classic)
5. Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill ( it's her third album, however, the difference between JLP and her first two is so drastic that when JLP started to blow-up on the music charts the record company started to pull the first two albums from stores )
6. Van Morrison - He does not regard his debut album, Blowin Your Mind! from 1967 as a true (first) album because it was compiled by someone else, Bert Berns the record producer, without Van's consent. Big mistake, Bert!!!
(Even if Blowin' Your Mind contains the epic smash hit Brown Eyed Girl, Van still don't consider as true album, on principle. Which is, well, very Van Morrison.
He considers his 2.nd album Astral Weeks from 1968, as the true first one, and if that's good enough for Van it's good enough for me)
7. Ministry - Debut With Sympathy was synthpop. Their 3rd album The Land of Rape and Honey is where they found their industrial metal sound
8. Anthrax- first album is ok, but muddled in terms of who they became. They changed some personnel and released spreading the disease next, which featured songs like madhouse
9. The Beastie Boys - Don't get me wrong, License to Ill is a great album, but when they dropped Paul's Boutique, that's when they came into their own and just let the album breathe. Their eclectic style was cemented then.
10. Amy Winehouse - it wasn’t until Back To Back and Mark Ronson’s knob twiddling that Amy’s trademark classic soul/torch song sound emerged. Debut ‘Frank’ was more wine bar jazz, albeit spiked with her incisive lyrics
11. Underworld - Underneath the Radar. In 1994, they added a DJ, released their 3rd album “Dubnobasswithmyheadman,” and became the Underworld we know today. Their debut record (which came out in 1988) was in a different style, but still a fantastic album.
12. Tiamat - Each of their first three albums was a slightly different style (black metal, death metal, and then doom metal). They were all solid albums, with each one better than the last, but their fourth album 'Wildhoney' proved to be their magnum opus and solidified their newfound psychedelic/goth/prog rock style.
13. Nirvana - yeah i went there. Bleach is a kind of sludgy indie metal jumble. on nevermind, the quiet bit/noisy bit formula was set in stone, a pattern faithfully followed on in utero, even though it differed a lot sonically from nevermind.
ok so now i gotta think of a new topic
