Who Has Had The Most “Returns To Form”?
Applied to pop, this question – discussed at some length in the pub last night – proves surprisingly complex. “Dylan” was everybody’s obvious answer* but the more we thought about it the less sure we were about this. So I throw it open to the Freaky Trigger readership and wish them joy with it.
*why yes, it WAS an all-male party, why do you ask?
Madonna. Kylie.
Rolling Stones? Beggar’s Banquet, Some Girls, Steel Wheels, A Bigger Bang at least – maybe every album since Steel Wheels.
Elton John maybe, as he’s cranked out enough records, often harking back to the ‘classic’ sound (re 20). A Single Man, Too Low For Zero, Reg Strikes Back, Made In England, Songs From The West Coast, The Captain and the Kid…
wld buy another Costello/Brodsky album ahead of any Imposters record
Nick Cave is curious bcz his only real “return to form” comes after one of his most critically acclaimed periods! Moatman’s Balls/No More Shall We Fart are horribly snoozesome up-his-arse tediumfests, that were wildly praised for the sensitive piano songwriting balladry. BOREdry, morelike*.
This, and his general longevity and lack of interest in stagnating, means that the Abattoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus double came out as a “return to form” in terms of using the Bad Seeds as a band, having interesting arrangements and whatnot, but his new audience didn’t give a rats and so it kind of disappeared.
The longevity and shifting audiences also interestingly mean that the Grinderman/Lazarus/Grinderman period hasn’t been met by a superannuated early-mid ’80s audience rapturously welcoming his RETURN TO angry, noisy music FORM, but more being bemused by this strange new direction.
*The Good Son? The bad album. The Ship Song? etc etc…
@9 Yes Prince has got a charge sheet as long as your arm in this area, to the extent that reviews of his albums (when they have been reviewed at all) over the past two decades almost always felt the need to acknowledge it, by saying something like “this is not the return to form we’ve all been waiting for….”
Prince is an interesting one, though, because the current critical consensus seems to be that he really has returned to form, but only in live performance. There have been a number of reviews along the lines of “I have’t heard anything since Batman, and I wouldn’t listen to the last five albums if you paid me to. But he does put on a fantastic show.”
has rod stewart ever had a return to form? he was suddenly all over the place as a lad icon [shudder] in the mid nineties and is kind of a national treasure these days but i’m prety sure no one was ever talking up his latest album much.
#28 – RE Nick Cave – I liked ‘No More’ and the like, then went on to utterly love ‘Abattoir Blues’. Probably helped that I hadn’t really heard his early stuff, which I’ve now gone back to.
#21/22 – Pete – along with The Who IMHO.
Cliff Richard?!
If we stick to recorded material, I’d probably rule out Prince, not because he hasn’t had better and worse periods followed by better periods(which he clearly has), but because of his general, almost unabated tendency, for much of his career, to exercise far too little quality control or editing, and to release excessive quantities of material, meaning that, even when he was absolutely on top form, it was still necessary to do a fair bit of sorting wheat from chaff.
Not enough counting on this comments thread: viz if acclaimed artist x makes two lousy records then three good ones is that ONE or THREE returns to form. Surely the “most” returns to forms = the most up-and-diwn like a yo-yo?
Also koganbot is right when he points out — without saying it out loud — that there’s something very questionable about the kind of artist we are on the whole holding this accolade back for…
joan jett <—
Paul Weller:
1978 – All Mod Cons
1993 – WildWood
2008 – 22 Dreams
Very good/exceptional albums after bouts of mediocrity.
“something very questionable about the kind of artist” — er yes what i in fact mean is “something very questionable about the very narrow range of KINDS of artist”
(and by questionable i probably actually just mean INTERESTING and worth exploring)
The choice of Weller is backed up by stringent internet research into Britain’s leading exponent of returns to form:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Aqthemusic.com+%22return+to+form%22
^^^actual internet science at last (.feat.THE FUTUREHEADS)
Re 34 – And how to assess the re-evaluations that happened between releases is also very important. “Black Tie White Noise” was hailed as RTF for Bowie at the time, and then quickly became rather less hailed.
Which meant that “Outside” could also be an RTF. And so on, but were those both right? Both wrong? One of them only?
Beastie Boys
@35. Hang on, The Jam’s first single was in 1977 – a year’s a bit quick to find form, lose it then regain it, doncha think?
@37. Checking that link, Q cites Massive Attack’s recent work as a possible RTF, but fans don’t see it that way (anymore than Portishead’s fans do with their stuff). 100th Window felt a bit odds-and-ends-ish (hence unlikely to garner any new fans) but was otherwise a fine record (assuming one liked MA in the first place). MA’s principal issue is their slowness not their wild inconsistency which I take it is what normally prompts RTF observations.
Thinking some more about RTF ideas…. I think it’s basically a sporting (maybe even a race-horsing) idea that only fully makes sense when there’s a pretty singular dimension along which output gets measured (ideally something as simple as ‘time around a track’). In performance arts where aging is a real factor – so that even if you in some sense have a RTF then you won’t be doing anything like what you did earlier – then the number of dimensions along which one’s measuring form to enable comparisons explodes. I find film directors easier to think about in RTF terms than film actors for this reason (i.e., because it’s easier to think of them as always doing the same thing). Musicians tend to be an interestingly muddled middle case – they’re more like directors than actors at least in some ways, but not in all. It feels to me that as though we do salute Neil Young or Marianne Faithful or the Stones or whomever for figuring out some way to gracefully grow old in a very public, youth-worshipping medium in roughly the same way we do for Michael Caine or Mirren or Angelica Huston or Hackman without burdening them with any simple notion of form they may once have had and now must try to return to, etc..
@36 Good point. Dylan rules the RTF league because he invented the type of artist who is allowed an RTF: serious, album-based, self-expressive, capable of progress and growth.
Elvis had an RTF, but only after Dylan made it possible.
It’s all totally rockist, of course.
Exceptions? Bobby Womack with ‘The Poet’ and ‘Poet 2′, maybe, which was a Soul RTF. But he fit all the criteria for seriousness, album-centrednes (album-centricity?), etc.
As robotsdancingalone suggests, Kylie is a good one. The RTF panel apparently makes an exception for her because of sentimental affection for ‘Neighbours’, or something.
Re 41: “I find film directors easier to think about in RTF terms than film actors for this reason (i.e., because it’s easier to think of them as always doing the same thing).”
That’s a brilliantly concise one-line way of saying what I was trying to say in this now horribly dated piece.
so why don’t we want to apply form to singles and singles bands like the jam (who made just one good-ish LP ever, so never even reached “album form”)? there was — especially with louis armstrong — something of a watch on, from the 30s, to see if/when he’d produce work again that matched the hot fives and the hot sevens (which periodically he did): rockwrite is bad at seeing and knowing that many of its shapes and habits preceded it in jazzwrite, but some of them surely did
i think it’s less about “seriousness” per se, than about the achievement of some quality assumed not to usually inhere in the (popular?) art-form the artists under regard are working in (sustained aesthetic value?) Doesn’t RTF also imply the stamp of approval of “return to relative popularity”? i feel there’s an implied paradox involved; it’s a validation of the overall project rock critics are involved in, because it affirms that value and accessibility and public recognition of both can all (sometimes) combine
what about novelists? painters? poets? (i don’t mean, do they or don’t they have peaks and troughs — ans = yes obv — but do we respond in the same way?)
In actual salaried music crit speak RTF usually means “give us an interview.”
haha a desire which certainly reflects perceived return to popularity
except there are perhaps also artists whose face on the cover might depress readership? bobby brown on the MM? (cilla black on the NME was notoriously the best-selling issue of the decade, by an enormous margin)
@45 Or “I’ve been taken to Antigua to hear it”?
“The Brothers Karamazov” was decidedly a RTF (and widely recognized as such) after the thin and excessively lengthy gruel of “The Adolescent” (a.k.a. “A Raw Youth” a.k.a. “An Accidental Family” a.k.a. doubtlessly other translations or interepretations of the title none of which have stuck so minor is the book in comparison with the author’s other major works)
Re: The Jam @ #41: Second album (This is the modern world) got panned as a lazy retread of the first and the band were reduced to supporting Blue Oyster Cult on tour in America. All Mod Cons was hailed not so much as a return to form, but of the flowering of Weller’s youthful talent.
Most proclaimed RTFs: Oasis. But only by Noel Gallagher. Every album was preceded by an interview promising the best album since Morning Glory (later this was backdated even further to Definitely Maybe once everyone decided that was the only half decent Oasis album) and everyone wondered how long before they dropped this embarassing charade and got on with cranking out the old hits for the fans.
No more RTFs for them: http://remhq.com/news_story.php?id=1446