10 Rock Bands That Never Made The Same Album Twice

Most Diverse Discographies.

By Tim Coffman /

The biggest fear that comes with being in a rock band is irrelevance. No matter how much you may think you're tried and true formula might work from one song to the next, there comes a point where you're going to have to mix things up to keep up with the times. Then again, the most artistic of bands aren't meant to stay in one sound forever.

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Across every decade of rock and roll, there have been bands willing to twist their sound around into different forms regardless of whether they would be successful or not. Although some of these records are a bit more ill advised than others, there aren't any pieces of their catalog that sound like they're coaxing off of nostalgia or trying to chase trends to please the general market. On each respective project, these songs feel more like new creative endeavors than anything else, taking the crux of what they had before and frankensteining it into something entirely new.

As much as the fans may have rejected some of these albums, you can't really fault these artists for following their heart and doing whatever satisfied their creative spirits. Because if there's anything that rock and roll is known for, it's about deviating from the norm.

10. Pearl Jam

Most of us have probably suffered through enough Pearl Jam for all of our collective lifetimes. That's not from Pearl Jam proper though...just the endless amounts of copycats that have come and gone since '92 trying to copy Eddie Vedder's signature singing style. Even though the likes of Creed or Puddle of Mudd might make their living out of making their own versions of Ten, these Seattlites have left their debut in the rearview a long time ago.

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As far back as Vs., Eddie always was trying to experiment with different variations on the Pearl Jam formula, which often came in the form of some weird art rock like the funk of Rats or the almost punk sounds on Blood. On Vitalogy though, the masses got the feeling that this was going to be one trip of a band, with most of the art rock tendencies going through the roof alongside classic hits like Nothingman.

Ever since, Vedder, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament have left virtually nothing off the table, from the weird downtempo material on No Code to the experimentation going on in Binaural and Riot Act with sound recording. Hell, even when they returned to more rocking material, songs like the Fixer was accompanied by a new wave bent. Going even further with Gigaton, Pearl Jam is still one of the few active rock bands who can still manage to surprise us.

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