The Progression (or regression) of your favourite artist(s)

[Trollheart]

Sometimes the debut album is solid, and the next one not so good, or the reverse: debut weak but they make up for it next time. Some bands/artists have a pretty consistent flow of quality all through their career, but many go up and down (and often repeat this). So how do your favourite artists fare?

I'm looking into Supertramp first.

Debut album was good but not really an indication of where they would be going - more folk than rock really, though there were some good ideas on it. Second album, Indelibly Stamped, went more back to a blues/roots rock sort of thing and I really didn't like it. It wasn't till their third that they hit their stride, and for five years they really could do no wrong commercially (or artistically), with albums like Crime of the Century, Crisis? What Crisis?, Even in the Quietest Moments and their breakthrough Breakfast in America.

After that, there was one more album before founder member Roger Hodgson left, the appropriately-titled Famous Last Words giving them one last hurrah in 1982, and scoring another hit with "It's Raining Again". Then the rot began to set in.

Though critically acclaimed, I found 1985's Brother Where You Bound a big bore, with a sixteen-minute title track that just wanders around and goes nowhere. This was not the Supertramp I'd come to know and love. A sixteen-minute song? They'd never done much over ten before, and had made their name on short, snappy, pop prog songs. This was, to me, remaining founder member Rick Davies indulging himself to the max. And the next album was another blues one; while Free as a Bird has a few decent tracks they're very much outnumbered by the poorer ones, and I saw Supertramp's fortunes declining very rapidly and sadly.

Then there was hope ten years later (!) in 1997, where the not-at-all-appropriately-named Some Things Never Change did in fact see a change in recent Supertramp music, a sort of melding of Davies' new influences and moods, and somewhat a return to the more commercial fare of the seventies and early eighties.

Their last album was released in 2002, and this time it was an appropriate title. Slow Motion was exactly that: it dragged, it meandered, it bored. And that's been it from them so far. I don't know if, almost twenty years down the line, we can expect another album from the band, but if so, I really hope it improves on the last.

Your turn. How has your favourite band done throughout its discography?