Return to glory? Is it honestly possible?

I think the problem is that fans interpret "recapture the glory" as "do what they already did". Bands are like any other artist. They grow and change. Twenty or thirty years between albums is necessarily going to result in something different because it's made by people who are now different. A lot of people who loved an artist once upon a time aren't going to get attached to new work from that artist decades later because what they really want is more of the same. They don't want their favorite bands to grow as artists. And any artist who tries to cater to that attitude is going to fail artistically, because they're not doing what comes naturally. A fifty year old man isn't going to create the same piece of music that a twenty year old man would. And fans hate that.

If the press says it, I don't consider anything more than a misleading commercial for next week's episode of whatever. Purely cynical marketing.

If the artist says it, unless the album is pretty much about the old times, with I don't know nostalgia or "those days are gone" type of things, I assume that really their motivation wasn't probably in the right place and it's the equivalent for more "reputable" artists than a comeback album with the hottest young producers to try and score a hit, except instead of with the mainstream audiences, its with the old one.
However there are exceptions, Nick Cave is still touching a lot of the points he would in the past (of course colored by his age and experience) and he's all the better for it.

Dylan's done it several times.

Chris Cornell overcame a crippling drug addiction and half a decade of seclusion, only to reemerge with Audioslave and a critically aclaimed solo record.

Audioslave made some decent songs, I guess, but I haven't had the desire to listen to ANY of their music for a long time now. I enjoyed each of their albums initially, but quickly lost interest in all three cases. I really like Cornell's first solo album, Euphoria Morning, though. His second one, Carry On, is just terrible, apart from a few songs at the most. And the one track I've heard off his forthcoming Timbaland produced album, Scream*, is wretched. So, I think, musically, Cornell has been on the decline ever since Audioslave's debut. Where's the "return to glory" in that? But to each his own, of course.

Dylan, though, I totally agree with you there. His past three albums got some critical acclaim, but I still consider them underrated. The fact that I only know a few people (in the real world) with great taste in music could be giving me a false perception there, though. For that reason, I often wonder if I know what I'm talking about when I call something "underrated". Anyway, Dylan's most recent three albums - Time out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times - are more than worth checking out whether you like any of his prior stuff or not.


*I'm expecting that album will be a catastrophic shit-storm, but would love to be proven wrong.

It definitely doesn't reach the heights of Pet Sounds, but Brian Wilson's new one, "That Lucky Old Sun" is maybe a better album than "Smile." I wouldn't say it's a "return to glory," but it's definitely the peak of Wilson's post-addiction/depression phase that started a few years back. It's seriously great.

Neil Young is probably the single best example of the late-career rebound (even moreso than Dylan, who would occasionally release critically acclaimed albums in the years leading up to Time Out of Mind). By the end of the 80s, he was practically written off as irrelevant, but then rebounded with Freedom, Ragged Glory, Weld, Harvest Moon, and Sleeps with Angels... and then subsequently became hit-and-miss again. All of these retain elements of his classic 70s sound, if in a somewhat updated form.

Johnny Cash also had something of a career renaissance with the Rubin recordings. And I think there are promising hints of Springsteen's late 70s and early 80s sound on Magic - aspects of his music that haven't been there for a while.

On a smaller scale, I consider All That You Can't Leave Behind a healthy, if not exactly Joshua Tree-level, return to form for U2 (even if they failed to make good on it entirely on the follow-up), and Accellerate certainly bodes well for R.E.M.

According to a friend of mine, Rick Rubin's producing the next Z Z Top, and it's supposed to be a return to form from the 1970s, when they played those long dirty blues songs before they became a hitchurner in the 1980s. Looking forward to that.

Urban legend, I'd guess. He was trying to stretch himself, artistically, and some of those albums (Trans, in particular) have since been embraced as underrated by a lot of Young fans. Plus, he kept stretching even after the early 80s and the lawsuit that Geffen filed against him for not sounding "Neil Young" enough.

He didn't really get back to the rock and folk sound until Freedom.

Which reminds me - Lou Reed's arguably another one. His early solo albums were these big productions, pretty far from the Velvets aesthetic. He briefly went after the stripped-down Velvets sound in the early 80s on The Blue Mask (a great album), but synths started seeping in after that. But in '89, he released New York, which, while not sounding all that much like the Velvets in composition, has the raw sound of four people in a studio making music on the fly. Mo Tucker even plays on "Dimestore Mystery," which is probably about as Velvets-sounding as he ever sounded solo.

I don't know if his 80s success amounted to "glory," but Steve Earle fell down a hole for almost 10 years and came back the better for it.

Mission of Burma. Apart for over a decade and then returned with two albums of their best music.

Practically two decades, actually. But that was less a "return to form" and more just a "return." They didn't have to revert to an old sound, since that sound never actually changed.

Still impressive, though. I might like The Obliterati more than Vs.

I think when it's said, it's usually just marketing bullshit. Pearl Jam's self titled sounded NOTHING like Ten or Vs. I don't like the idea that an album has the "sound" or "commercial appeal" of what made the previous efforts the gold standard. It doesn't work.

I think it has to do with expectations. We get something good, and we want more of the same. When we get more of the same... we're bored or full of that same already, so we're left underwhelmed. When we get something different, we look the other way because it's not what we expected an therefore "no good".

These are all editorial 'we', BTW.

This is true - most artists don't tend to go back and do exactly what they used to, and even when they do, it's hard to say whether they hit upon what made those earlier efforts great.

That said, Neil Young's work in the late 80s/early 90s did refer back to his 70s work in a way that his early/mid-80s work doesn't. The s/t Pearl Jam album doesn't sound much like Ten or Vs. overall, but some of it does in significant ways. For instance, Vedder's delivery and the clean guitars on "Come Back" sound an awful lot like early Pearl Jam. And the Edge very consciously used his 80s guitar sound on All That You Can't Leave Behind.

Do you think Paul McCartney's last couple of records can be called a "return to glory"? That "glory" was a pretty big mountain!