The band continued to explore a wider variation of musical types in their fourth album, A Thousand Suns (2010), layering their music with more electronic sounds and beats.
Each album is presented with its album art, track listing, and a quote from one of the critical or musical types polled.
Every year I've covered the Mercurys there seems to be an obsession with what musical types scoff at these bashes, possibly because it's always fancy and posh.
But his former life – as a youth in Washington at the height of grunge, as a collaborator with diffident musical types Jay Farrar and Jimmy Tamborello, as husband to Zooey Deschanel – is still rich pickings.
Back then, I listened to a wide range of musical types and found it curious that the number of African-Americans on stage often outnumbered those in the audience.
This simple interview format – musical types decide whether things are overrated or underrated – works really well, revealing character, prompting humour, and leaving you feeling as if you've learned a lot more about them than if they'd just been droning on about their new album for 10 minutes.
The idea was not to be reductive, but instead to be more granular and rigorous in their classification of musical types, going beyond the handful of genres used by terrestrial radio to identify music.
