Adveser wrote:
Something tells me they had a producer that was heavily involved in the songwriting and arrangement early and they have gone away from taking much advice in that regard. I have no idea, but that is usually the circumstances. The song titles alone for about half of these would have resulted in me personally calling the label (you know, if I were the producer and the label hired me, which is usually how it goes, though not always like that these days) I would have A&R discuss with them why exactly the stuff in the past was well regarded and a song title such as "shitload of money" does not fit whatsoever into that.
This sort of thing often happens when foreigners who don't have the best grasp on English try to write songs that are lyrically current. It happens all the time.
When musicians are young, it's cool to write fantastical lyrics...you know, dragons, satan, unicorns, whatever. Cheesy stuff, for sure. When they mature, they start caring about real-life issues, like most of us, and their lyrics/song titles become a different kind of cheese because they're serious now.
I agree with this. Nice post. Some of these bands write extremely hard to grasp lyrics that are almost encoded for certain people who have experienced something similar first hand to understand. Since a lot of people know the album - Serenity's "Reduced To Nothingness" is like that for me. Personally, I think they get jaded that no one walks up to them and tells them exactly how personal and close those lyrics were for them. I think this results in laziness. Maybe it is just the fans. Most of the bands I listen to are charting the very same waters with much different vessels, that's the easy way to put it. I think they are very much aware of this but are puzzled why no one else seems to notice.