Top 100 Albums of the 1980s (40-21)

The Eastern Bloc rocks to Elton John

(100 - 81 | 80-61 | 60-41)

#40. Michael Jackson - Thriller (1982)

Thriller isn’t just the biggest album of the 1980s, it’s the biggest album ever, an achievement that is permanently etched into stone. And how can I critically evaluate a cultural phenomenon? Well, for starters, I’ll add to the pile and say that the Paul McCartney duet leaves something to be desired, especially that back-and-forth they have at the end. The song was clearly written and chosen to be the lead single to capitalize on the McCartney-Wonder hit “Ebony and Ivory,” and I just don’t buy McCartney or Jackson as sexual beings enough to fight over a woman. (For the album’s 25th anniversary edition, will.i.am removes McCartney and then realizes it’s just awkward empty space, and then “fixes” the track by inserting himself.)

“That Girl is Mine” also has another issue, which is that the album starts off great with “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and then falters with its second and third steps. It famously regains its footing with the blockbuster three-song stretch in the middle during which it doesn’t even bother having an identity: campy “Thriller” ends the first side, and immediately we’re thrown into Eddie Van Halen-assisted hard rock-pop hybrid. (Here’s another criticism: the synthesized bass-line of “Thriller” can’t carry it for 6 minutes, and though the Vincent Price outro is well-performed, the song would’ve only benefitted without it.)

I guess I’m just not invested enough in Michael Jackson as a cultural icon, and the album owes much to Quincy Jones who punches up the mix in such a way that the songs cement themselves in your head even before Jackson starts singing. (Max Martin took that method of megahit-making to heart a decade and a half later.) The only song I might throw on from time to time here is “Human Nature,” a counter to anyone who thinks that Jackson couldn’t write a ballad anymore; the instrumental feels extremely close, and the opening rush of synths is like being in a metropolis city caught in technocolor rain. But even then, I probably won’t pull it out because I might just go with Vijay Iyer’s covers instead.

#39. Madonna - True Blue (1986)

In 1984, Ms. Magazine named Cyndi Lauper as its ‘Woman of the Year’ after “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” topped charts, describing the anthem as “about a newer defiant joy and the celebration of our strength.” Cyndi Lauper was not able to follow up her debut album from 1983 until 1986. By contrast, Madonna followed up her debut album from 1983 (considered for this list) with a great sophomore in 1984, her best (non-album) single in 1985, and then continued on the warpath with True Blue in 1986, the best selling albsum of the year and what would be the best selling album made by a woman that entire decade.

True Blue is her best album: almost every song is a winner (the album only trails off near the end), upping the melody quotient of the previous two albums while starting to assimilate far-reaching influences like 60s’ girl group to South African rhythms and acoustic guitars into her own, distinct sound, something that she’ll be renown for for the rest of her career. It also sees her pivoting from the ‘fun’ Madonna of the 1980s into the ‘serious’ Madonna of the 1990s without getting boring. She adopts a throatier vocal for “Papa Don’t Preach,” “What I need right now is some good advice, please…” in a way that always stops my short and makes me confused when people think she isn’t a good singer or that her contemporaries like Janet Jackson or Lauper were better vocalists.

“Open Your Heart” (originally a rock song written for Lauper) hooks hard with more of that great singing, and the song is never stagnant thanks to the synthesized rhythm section that earns the fake kung-fu opening and the additional textures in the quick burst of horns and keyboards buried way deep in the choruses. I think Max Martin took the harmony work of the title track to heart for his mad-scientist productions decades later. “Live to Tell” ranks amongst her best ballads, with the surprise of the electric guitar texture at the 1:52 mark joining the synth orchestra. Madonna would round out the decade with Like a Prayer, which has that great title track, but the Prince-Madonna duet comes years too late for both, and though Prayer increases the sonic diversity, it doesn’t come close to this album’s quality, nor anything else Madonna would go on to do.

#38. Manuel Göttsching - E2-E4 (1984)

More than most, Manuel Göttsching best represents krautrock’s rejection of the American and British cultures that was everywhere in Germany as a result of the allied occupation of the country. Born in 1952, he became inspired to play electric guitar because of the Rolling Stones and started his career with playing covers as the Steeple Chase Bluesband. After discovering less popular and more psychedelic and harder forms of rock, he went on to form Ash Ra Tempel whose music was a towering and impregnable version of post-rock about 15 years ahead of schedule that could only be found in Germany in the early 70s. And when he went solo, he switched yet again, this time to new age/electronic music.

As 1981 came to a close, Ash Ra Tempel guitarist Manuel Göttsching went home from a tour, recorded himself jamming and improvising with chords, sequencers, and volume, and produced E2-E4 just like that: the time it takes to listen to it is exactly the amount of time for him to create it. Interestingly, despite it being his third solo album, it’s the first to be filed under his birth-name. His first solo record, Inventions for Electric Guitar, has “Ash Ra Tempel VI” on its sleeve, as if to say it was the sixth proper Ash Ra Tempel album while second solo album New Age of Earth was filed under a one-time synonym Ashra. It’s appropriate that it’s his first record under his real name because it’s the one that he’ll be most fondly remembered for. The album became a surprise hit across the ocean at New York City’s Paradise Garage where American listeners would have heard someone making ambient techno many years before Warp became founded.

Inspired by the American minimalists as so many other krautrockers were—including Can and Agitation Free—Göttsching’s original intent was not to make a dance record but one resembling minimalism: long, pulsing, and slowly changing, and he was surprised to hear of its success as a dance record at all. It’s one continuous hour-long piece, but they also parsed it out into different sections, so feel free to take it either way: (1) as minimalism and absorb in full, or (2) as dance music in bite-sized chunks. Better yet: why not both?

#37. Pat Metheny & Ornette Coleman - Song X (1986)

I’m of the rare opinion that Ornette Coleman’s late-period work (post-1970) is probably better than his early career because he diversified: he tested the waters on fusion on Science Fiction, tried his hand with third stream with Skies of America, went full-blown funk minimalism on Dancing in Your Head, and kept up with production trends on Virgin Beauty and Tone Dialing, and his final album, Sound Grammar, is an easy choice for best jazz album of its decade. That’s just a sampler of what he’s been up to. Song X is his collaboration with Pat Metheny, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that it was the label (Geffen)’s doing to put the more popular Metheny on the top billing here. Consider this: Coleman is the sole composer of four songs here, and co-writes the other four that Metheny writes. Consider this: Coleman has the bigger presence on every song. Consider this: this was the same label that was attempting to sue Neil Young around this time.

Sweetening the deal is an incredible rhythm section, with Coleman’s ever-reliable Charlie Haden on bass and the venerable Jack DeJohnette—who I already praised to the moon on this list—on drums, as well as Ornette’s own son Denardo Coleman for extra drums and percussion. It’s true that Denardo is not a great player by any means, and him tossing in the occasional gated drums instantly dates this release to the 1980s. But Denardo was a rock drummer—loud, fast, irregular, impulsive—and Ornette continued to work with him through the years because he took it as a challenge for him and his band to navigate around.

What’s not mentioned nearly enough about Metheny’s guitar here is that it sometimes doesn’t sound like a guitar; certainly not the clean sound that Metheny typically played with on his own records as bandleader. And Metheny’s presence also has Ornette Coleman playing his most overtly jazz album in some time. The results are cuts like “Kathelin Gray” which contains the yearning sax sound that came effortlessly to Coleman, aided by twinkling harmonies from Metheny that sometimes lag behind Coleman in a ballad that’s on par with “Unknown Artist” from Virgin Beauty, or “Mob Job,” with the slinky bass-line from Charlie Haden where Coleman switches to a violin in a way that’s reminiscent of what John Cale brought with his viola to the Velvet Underground. “Song X” contains impressive counterpoint between the two leads, while “Endangered Species” is the 13-minute centerpiece where Haden’s sawing bass notes add to the bee-swarm mass.

#36. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Juju (1981)

It seems to me like Siouxie and the Banshees are almost distinctively a British thing, because I so rarely hear them talked about at all in music circles despite just how much they did for alternative, underground culture. (Chris Ott: “Because the Sex Pistols break up, and the Clash decide they’re the British Bruce Springsteen, Siouxie and the Banshees are the last ones kind of fighting the punk fight. So whatever all these people believed in that’s been shattered and is over, Siouxie and the Banshees were trying to rebuild it. The bile and the confrontation, and the rage, emotionally, that was a component of punk rock? That finds itself in goth.”) Their influence spans post-punk to morose indie to 90s’ female-led alternalia and even U2, yes, U2, since Steve Lillywhite cut his teeth producing Siouxsie and the Banshee’s records and brought that sound over to U2’s first three albums.

Whereas Kaleidoscope—their first album with Magazine guitarist John McGeoch and Slits drummer Budgie—was a conscious decision to get more colourful, Juju was a conscious decision to return to the darkness, but now with a much better band. Bassist Steven Severin said that “Juju was the first time we’d made a “concept” album that drew on darker elements. It wasn’t pre-planned, but, as we were writing, we saw a definite thread running through the songs; almost a narrative to the album as a whole.”

Sioux is magnificent on the frontlines—her sadistic grin comes through her vocals throughout, making it one of the most Halloween-appropriate albums on this list even if they didn’t have a song about the evening—but in McGeoch, she finally gets another musician to match her. His acoustic rush on “Spellbound” earns the heady title, while he turns guitar grenades into a groove on “Halloween” and funks up 60s’ garage rock on “Monitor.” Elsewhere, on the Joy Division-esque “Into the Light,” he responds to Siouxsie Sioux’s choruses with a labyrinthian guitar line, while his towering guitar wall of “Night Shift” aligns the Banshees to shoegaze which was developing around this time.

#35. Hüsker Dü - New Day Rising (1985)

After demonstrating that hardcore music should be taken as seriously as prog on Zen Arcade, Hüsker Dü prove something else on follow-up New Day Rising: that hardcore could have sweet, replete with bubblegum melodies and close vocal harmonies. This is everything I wanted Jesus and the Mary Chain’s Psychocandy: a marriage of pop and noise, and I find the feedback from Hüsker Dü to be that far more bracing and unique, generated from the treble of guitar turned all the way up.

It’s true that the album patters out near the end—the nadir is “How To Skin A Cat” where they read out words from a 1875 advertisement—but the first ten songs would have been more than enough, just hit after hit in the vein of the 60s’ rock albums that Dü were a huge fan of (they had covered the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” just the prior year as one of their best singles). Being a hardcore band, their interests in sound trump all else, including language, hence the opener which just repeats “New day rising” over and over: it takes musicianship on an extreme level to be able to make a song out of a 3-word hook, and the results of the opening volley from Grant Hart and the swelling vocals make me think of the cover, like a celebrated summer’s just on the horizon. As a result, when the hooks aren’t big and obvious, you gotta really search for the words buried underneath the alternating sear and crunch of the guitar. But some of them turn out to be worth the trouble: “Worn out shoes and a worn out dress / A worn out smile that she’ll wear some more”; “I’m going to turn into a lens and focus all my attention / On finding a new planet and naming it after her.” That last one! Golly, Grant Hart, you’re so sweet!

The best-ever Dü songs are found here, including “Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” where Greg Norton’s bass-line functions as a hook in itself; “Celebrated Summer,” with its breathing room section that feels like it wandered in from a bucolic prog album and not a hardcore band; “Books About UFOs,” with its absurd piano jingle. After 1985 (i.e. after they released another album that year), Hüsker Dü became a power pop band when they signed onto Warner Bros. where they focused more on the sweetness of New Day Rising at the cost of sound, fire, blood, sweat, sear, and crunch.

#34. Cocteau Twins - Treasure (1984)

Cocteau Twins were one of the first major bands to be categorized under “dream pop,” essentially pop-leaning alternative music with an emphasis on production techniques that created a friendly psychedelic (dreamy) effect. They were also the best because their version of dream pop wasn’t purged of nightmares: it was an interesting balance of light and dark that made them unique. The countless imitators that came afterwards dropped the darkness, and none of them could imitate Liz Fraser’s vocals anyway.

Treasure is their best album because it pulls from Head Over Heels’ darkness and looks forward to Heaven or Las Vegas’ brightness, with even some Victorialand to go around. Not only is every song exactly what the title suggests they’ll be, but the album is well-sequenced: two hooky pop songs at the start, two siren songs to follow, Fraser guiding you back to safety with “Pandora”; the band letting you drift off with “Otterley” but waking you up for Christmas morning on “Donimo.”

The album will be the last time that Robin Guthrie’s monolithic drum programming has such presence on a Cocteau Twins record, and I’m not even thinking of “Persephone” when it’s heaviest: note the drum-roll at the 0:42 mark of “Lorelei,” like a machine glitching out, or even the loud mixing of the drum smacks on “Pandora” that makes the song feel like we’re watching a deeply intimate slow dance between two lovers as fireworks hit the sky in slow motion above them. Interestingly, 4AD label-head Ivo Watts-Russell tried to get Brian Eno to produce the album with Daniel Lanois, but Eno felt that the band didn’t need them — I agree: it’s hard to imagine this album being any better with Eno (although I would be tempted to hear an Eno-produced version of Victorialand).

#33. Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses (1986)

If there are more powerful opening lines to any song than “Vicky’s Box,” which goes “He / Won’t ride in cars anymore / It reminds him of blowjobs / That he’s a queer,” then please private message me because I cannot think of any. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” doesn’t even come close. Over the labyrinthian-funk bass-line of Leslie Langston and clanging guitar chords, Kristen Hersh describes sex as something terrible and hideous and scary, appropriate for the era of AIDS: “And his hair / Stuck to the roof, over the wheel / Like a pigeon on a tire / Goes around / And circles over circles.” Then, the section immediately afterwards, from 1:47 - 3:14 is exhilaratingly bleak. Each repetition of “He won’t ride anymore” is more darkly shaded than the last, and they stretch out the tension until Hersh screams “WELCOME HOME” that leads the song into its third and final climactic section. If 4AD’s Cocteau Twins were dream pop, then Throwing Muses were the inverse: nightmare rock.

At the core of Throwing Muses were two guitarists-singer/songwriters in Kirsten Hersh and Tanya Donnelly, and I wish that there was more push-pull between the two here as Donnelly only gets to contribute one song here. The one song that Donnelly writes is “Green,” a strictly more formal composition that’s an album highlight as she works out the grief who passed away over guitar arpeggios. The invocation of “green eyes” here—in reference to her first love who passed away (“He built a city in my head / And there were candles”)—is more powerful to me than the one on New Order’s “Temptation.” By contrast, Hersh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder since she was a young teen which she tried to manage with lithium. Some lyrics describe her mental state in detail (i.e. “I’m lonely at night […] I feel sad in the day”; “I’m losing my person”); others were born out of nervous breakdown (“My pillow screams, too / But so does my kitchen / And water and my shoes / And the road”). Fittingly, her songs twist and turn in strange and unpredictable ways; for example, centerpiece tracks “Vicky’s Box” and “Rabbits Dying” surge across their different sections.

There’s a moment on “Rabbits Dying” where the drummer smacks a cowbell just once in the middle of the transition—at the 1:21 mark—perking your ears up as the song enters its Americana section, and making the cowbell line that arrives about 15 seconds later feel that much more special. Alas, 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell—who did not sign bands across the ocean until he met the Throwing Muses, which opened the door for the Pixies—trimmed other Americana sections that might have pushed some other songs in the second half over the edge. But I think of that cowbell hit a lot, almost as much of the queer who can’t ride in cars anymore because they remind him of blowjobs.

#32. Dead Kennedys - Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980)

Key to understanding this album—“understanding,” I write, as if it weren’t just the hookiest, kookiest, and funniest of all hardcore—is that guitarist Carlo Cadona (“6025”) writes the generically and boringly-nihilistic “Forward to Death” while almost everything else is written by front-man Jello Biafra. 6025, who left the band shortly before the album’s release, genuinely felt that way when he was asked about it. By contrast, Biafra doesn’t want to die. He wants other people to die. In particular on his hit list are scummy landlords, no-good politicians, rich kids, and complacent hippies who gave up. A key line is on “Chemical Warfare,” where he toys with the idea of dropping mustard gas “On a country club full of Saturday golfers” because he knows golf is where most of those targets converge. He’s not an American hero, but he’s an American vigilante, fighting from the ashes of the American Dream.

The Dead Kennedys were comprised of Jello Biafra (vocals), East Bay Ray (guitar), Klaus Flouride (bass), Ted (drums) and 6025 (rhythm guitar), and keyboardist Paul Roessler, who couldn’t be bothered to don a nickname. A lot of attention goes to Jello’s vocals, and rightfully so: he sounds like a young teenager in the constant shake and mania of his voice despite the fact that he was in his early 20s when they recorded the album: “EEEEEE-fficiency and progress is ours once-a-more! / Now that we have the neu-u-tron bomb!” is how he starts the album, and I was immediately hooked. I liken Biafra not to other punk rock vocalists, but to rappers like Vince Staples or early Eminem, where the effect of their voices and lyrics is that if society produced something as violent as these, maybe we should be worried? What made them extra special was guitarist East Bay Ray, who, especially on the big singles “California Uber Alles” and “Holiday in Cambodia,” brought out a unique sound within hardcore by mining surf rock almost an entire decade before the Pixies got there (“Holiday in Cambodia” starts like a demented version of Dick Dale’s “Misirlou”, which you might recognize from Pulp Fiction).

Their politics writing is smart because they know no one’s politics within music isn’t going to change anyone’s minds, so they get super-satirical about it. “Kill the Poor” imagines using the neutron bomb on the homeless population (“No sense in war but perfect sense at home […] Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light / Jobless millions whisked away”) which is just one step away from what politicians are currently doing…which is wasting police resources and infrastructure to make sure homeless people can’t sleep on the streets. Meanwhile, “When Ya Get Drafted” must have felt profound given that President Jimmy Carter reinstated the draft registration in the summer they recorded Fresh Fruit; “Holiday in Cambodia” references the Cambodian genocide that had just taken place. “California Über Alles”—with that immortal primal drum introduction from Ted—makes fun of California governor Jerry Brown by likening him and his policies to that of Hitler. Biafra was asked at the time why he would target a liberal politician. The answer was simple, all politicians suck—which is part of why he ran for mayor—and true to that belief, they remade it on follow-up EP In God We Trust, Inc. under the name “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

#31. Kraftwerk - Computer World (1981)

With Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4, this is the only other ex-krautrock album to appear on this list; both are fairly popular and obvious, so know that I considered albums from Cluster’s Moebius (Material and Zero Set, the latter with Mani Neumeier) and Can’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit (Full Circle, with Jah Wobble), but ultimately couldn’t justify their inclusion. Of the five Kraftwerk albums that they themselves consider essential, Computer World is the shortest at 34 minutes in length, and that’s because they whittled down songs to their bare essentials. Had this been released just a few years prior, the songs would have easily run 6-8 minutes apiece with barely any development attempted because they need only sustain the groove—they were the grooviest band of white people—and the synth melodies. Potentially, this might have been attributed to the success of synth-pop that were inspired by Kraftwerk in the first place who were able to achieve mainstream success with 3-minute songs.

If Kraftwerk sounds dated, it’s for the same reason that much of rap music from the decade sounds that way: you’re just picking up on just how much music they’ve influenced since. Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark would quote “Computer World” almost wholesale on “Genetic Engineering” a few years later when the band wanted to try their hand at art-electronic on Dazzle Ships (an uneven album although it has one of the band’s best songs); the demonic robot vocals of “Numbers” are proto-Boards of Canada. Their music would be sampled in early hip-hop and would have a profound effect on Detroit techno: forgotten Le Car based their whole career around Kraftwerk’s love for locomotion while Underground Resistance’s Mad Mike considered “Numbers” the “secret code of electronic funk.” And their synth melodies would be a mainstay of house music; here’s an insane pull-quote from Moodymann about Kraftwerk: “I thought Kraftwerk was four niggas [...] Then we saw videos and we were like, ‘These motherfuckers from Europe?’”

More than their previous albums, the ones within Computer World actually feel like songs with their shorter lengths coupled with more organizational rigour such as the counterpoint of “Pocket Calculator” or how the sequel of “Computer World” folds in elements from “Numbers.” Each of these songs offer pleasures, and what’s unique about Computer World is how optimistic they sound about future technology: the chords throughout feel sky-blue, and there’s the oft-quoted lines from “Pocket Calculator”: “By pressing down a special key / It plays a little melody” which leads to a childlike call (robot vocal) and response (synth beep) that brings me infinite joy. Given how many people were so wary of future technology, it’s nice to hear a more nuanced take from the early 80s. Technology can be scary, yes, but it can also open doors — or create ones that didn’t exist previously. Or maybe just play a little melody.

#30. Morton Feldman - Triadic Memories (Aki Takahashi) (1989)

If you are unfamiliar with Morton Feldman, he was an American modern classical composer whose great contribution to music was that his best compositions freed themselves of length (by getting extremely long), and he eventually wrote in only one volume level: the quietest possible. His music was an extreme on two different spectra that has not been approached or imitated. If you don’t know his music, I recommend plunging into the deep end, starting with Triadic Memories. Feldman has described the composition as “probably the largest butterfly in captivity,” and the patterns that he would compose for his late-period solo works starting around this time are darkly-shaded. Wing-beats of small animals seeing the sky and unable to get there; phrases repeating over and over stuck in the same non-resolving stasis.

Like all of his late-period works, it’s a marathon for the performer to keep the tempo and volume steady (the audience too, though they get off easy by comparison). Actually, Aki Takahashi—who was the first person to record this—plays it much faster than the average (which makes it easier to get into), which is around 80-90 minutes, and Sabine Liebner put out a recording in 2005 that went a mammoth 124 minutes over two discs. But with a piece this long, any minor adjustments to tempo will have a large effect, and Feldman has nothing but the highest praise for Takahashi’s performance, so even if I prefer other performers that came later, I think Takahashi was able to get at the heart of what Feldman was after from the onset, “The effect of her playing to me is that I feel privileged to be invited to a very religious ritual.”

Feldman gets my vote for the best composer during this decade, and this list would be populated with his works except that the best ones would not be recorded until after his death in 1987 from pancreatic cancer, and it would seem strange to me to put albums that came out in the 1990s on a list about the 1980s. Just know that For Bunita Marcus and Piano and String Quartet should both be here.

#29. The Fall - Hex Enduction Hour (1982)

The Fall’s formula was simple, effective, and basically unchanging in the 42 years they were active: front-man Mark E. Smith yelled, seethed, railed—mostly completely amelodically—over the Velvet Underground’s chord changes and Can’s primal rhythm. And though their discography can be parsed out into phases, they remained steadfast to that formula which is why their 31-album studio discography might be the most-rewarding discography in rock music: you can’t make bad music if you’ve got the components right. Hex Enduction Hour is the culmination of their first few albums, deemed “a huge sort of kiss-off, to everything” by Smith. They thicken up the stew by adding a second drummer so that the post-punk pummel is far more potent than ever before (or ever again) because Smith realized it takes four arms to imitate what Can’s Jaki Liebezeit was doing. (After 1982, Mark E. Smith met and married Brix Smith, whose presence softened their sound up a bit.)

The album is split between songs that could conceivably be in a best of compilation, basically all the songs that are around 5 minutes or less that help parse out the longer grooves of “Winter,” “Iceland,” and “And This Day.” “Hip Priest” is between these two categories when it was used in the Silence of the Lambs soundtrack and became one of the Fall’s most well-known songs. Two-parter centerpiece “Winter” seems to be a thought experiment for how long they can stretch a single chord, but the cheap-sounding keyboards near the end of the second part makes it all worth it; “Just Step S’Ways” is a blood-pumping 60s’ garage rocker placed at the exact moment; “Who Makes the Nazis” has a very strange vocal sound—like Smith imitating a cow—that’s used throughout, as if mocking the “Intellectual half-wits” that Smith talks about: it’s one of many Fall songs where Steve Hanley is tasked with bringing the melody through his indispensable bass playing.

Mark E. Smith’s raving—inspired by a potent mix of drugs, literature, and lived experience—are abstract and absurd, puzzles not meant to be actually parsed out. But on closer inspection, they tend to be quite funny and even profound, which is especially true on Hex Enduction Hour. “There is no culture”; “I’m too tired to fuck / Y’see I’ve been laid off work”; “The Eastern Bloc rocks to Elton John”; “There’s still a subculture I feel adrift of”; “There are twelve people in the world / The rest are paste.”

#28. Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel (“Melt”) (1980)

Wherein one of the Gods of progressive rock buckles down—finally!—and makes his first great solo album. The supporting cast here includes Kate Bush, Robert Fripp, and Phil Collins, and is produced by Steve Lillywhite back when Lillywhite had a unique sound to him. Plus! A detour into South Africa before Talking Heads got there (Remain in Light was recorded afterwards) and Paul Simon, and an album cover of Storm Thorgerson, the not-secret weapon responsible for Pink Floyd’s success. The overall sound is pitch-black, thanks in no small part to Gabriel’s insistence that there’d be no cymbals, and the gated drum sound that would soon be everywhere in the decade, and the album plays like a psychological thriller. All this to say, tailor-made for me!

Collins’ beat on “Intruder” puts you in the action, as if the footprints of some ominous assailant in your home, and Gabriel’s wail, “Slipping the clippers through the telephone wirreeee” is a genuinely scary moment in what might be the scariest decade of music history. (The whistled coda represents the killer getting away with murder.) “No Self Control” brightens up the stew with a marimba line, though the obvious attraction is Robert Fripp bursting in halfway through. “Family Snapshot” sees Gabriel putting himself in the mind of Arthur Bremer who attempted to assassinate George Wallace, and the shift from ballad to rock and back to ballad reflects the would-be assassin’s mind as he mediates on that crime. Elsewhere, Peter Gabriel tours the world on “Games Without Frontiers,” starting with a French hook sung by Kate Bush and then the merry-go-round of lyrics, “Adolf builds a bonfire, Enrico plays with it […] Andre has a red flag, Chiang Ching’s is blue.”

This album was not made easily. Collins was game with Gabriel’s ban on cymbals, but Jerry Marotta was not; Gabriel said that, “It took him a while to settle in. It’s like being right-handed and having to learn to write with your left.” Meanwhile, Atlantic Records co-founder/president Ahmet Ertegun was against “Biko,” and according to Gabriel, said “What do people in America care about this guy in South Africa?,” and the label dropped him completely when they realized there was no commercial prospects here. Which, of course, makes no sense: the album is far catchier than “Scratch” despite the focus on atmosphere and texture, and “Games Without Frontiers,” “I Don’t Remember,” and even “And Through the Wire”—which might be the weakest song here—rank among the catchiest songs he wrote at this point.

#27. The Fall - This Nation’s Saving Grace (1985)

What proves out John Peel’s oft-traveled quotation about the Fall, “They are always different; they are always the same,” is their sound changed despite their formula remaining constant. The biggest change came from Laura Elisse Salenger who met Mark E. Smith in 1983, moved in with him, and married that same year, changing her name to Brix Smith after the Clash song “The Gus of Brixton.” Perverted by Language is the first album she appears on, and her pop sensibilities already come through as Mark E. Smith lets her have lead on the twee pop “Hotel Blöedel.” Her presence seemed to soften up the band’s impregnable grooves such that they resemble pop songs more and more, loaded with actual hooks.

In that regard, of all their albums, This Nation’s Saving Grace—where she co-writes three of the main songs as well as the short bookends—is the easiest to get into. The grooves are all distinct from one another thanks to the return of MVP Steve Hanley who had taken a break for paternity leave. Hanley had been replaced by Simon Rogers who stays on, but switches to keyboards, and I think we have the classically trained Rogers to thank for that theremin(?) touch on the brooding opener. If “Mansion” sets the stage, “Bombast” blows down the hatches with Mark E. Smith declaring, “All those whose mind entitles themselves, and whose main entitle is themselves shall feel the wrath of my bombast,” the pseudo-rhyme naturally emphasizing the words “Shall,” “Wrath” and “Bombast.”

Every song has the same instant-impact of “Bombast” whether it’s thanks to the upfront bass-line of “What You Need” or Mark E. Smith’s ditching his endless fount of words to just repeat the letters of “L.A.” over a cheapo keyboard. The second side is where the album shines most: Karl Burns’ drum-rolls on “Gut of the Quantifier” functioning as their own little hook while “My New House” proves that they could apply their classic Fall sound to an acoustic guitar. “Paint Work” has a chord progression that sounds cheerful, pretty rare for them, and Mark E. Smith’s distant vocals have a psychedelic effect that the band would explore again on “Frenz.” Finally, Mark E. Smith makes their influences very clear on “I Am Damo Suzuki” where Burns finally gets to work up some muscle; so interesting that Mark E. Smith would pick so hard on Pavement for imitating their sound on 20% of Pavement’s discography when the Fall were basically a hyper-literate version of Can with a vocalist that embodied both Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki.

#26. The Replacements - Tim (1985)

The most consistent of the Replacements’ big three albums between 1984 and 1987. The filler here—“Dose of Thunder” and “Lay It Down Clown”—does not feel as tossed-off as the filler on Let It Be, and while Tim was their major record debut, it sounds less like one—by which I mean, less compromise—than does Pleased to Meet Me where they embrace power pop and all its problems, including a tribute of their hero Alex Chilton where they imagine the power pop icon…raping and pillaging. (By contrast, the power pop on “Hold My Life” and “Kiss Me On the Bus” here are the closest anyone got to Big Star.) “Waitress in the Sky” might seem lightweight, but a really witty ditty when Westerberg calls a garbage man and a janitor, a “sanitation expert and a maintenance engineer” respectively, and manages to have that fit in with the rhyme/rhythm. (Compare to, say, “Jingle” from Westerberg solo album Folker which was just a ditty.)

What made the Replacements special was that they felt more deeply than any other rock band I can think of. Emo was starting around the same time the Replacements hit their stride, and yet, nothing I’ve heard from emo comes close to the vulnerability on display in Westerberg’s mature and often self-deprecating lyrics and voice explored on Let It Be and Tim. Whereas the emotionally devastating songs were distributed rather evenly throughout Let It Be, the ones on Tim are stacked all at the end. “Left of the Dial” is at once a love song and more obviously, an ode to college rock radio. Drumstick taps out every other line of the verses, emphasizing witty lines like “Pretty girl keep growin’ up, playin’ make-up, wearin’ guitar” but also giving the song a ‘stop-start’-y and on-the-cusp feeling at the same time; the opening chords announce that “Left of the Dial”—especially with that title—might be an underground anthem a la “Bastards of Young,” and then the lurchy motion of the song subverts those expectations. “Little Mascara” has that embracing hook, “All you ever wanted was someone to take care of ya” that spells out what the Replacements were always after on songs like “Androgynous”: letting listeners know they weren’t alone.

This all culminates with “Here Comes a Regular” where every single depressing lyric of the album—the “Hold my life because I just might lose it”’s, the “If being afraid’s a crime, we hang side-by-side”’s”—feel like they were rolled into one song, but crucially, with no electric guitar to distract us from the crushing lyrics; only a clear-as-crystal acoustic guitar, perhaps the best example of what the major label money was used for (that and alcohol; it clearly was not used on the cover). The last time I heard the song would have been an afternoon in the summer of 2012 where it broke me in half despite having known the song intimately for years before that. 12 years going strong by pretending to be strong ever since.

#25. Beastie Boys - Paul’s Boutique (1989)

No other hip-hop album sounds like this, partially because the Beastie Boys have their own unique approach to rapping—a lot of call and response, like three hyenas heads sharing the same body—but mostly because this rigorously-organized sample-based approach would be outlawed after 1989 when the Turtles took De La Soul to court for sampling them for 3 Feet High and Rising and won $1.7 million settled off-record. Yes, records before these two albums also deployed samples, but they deployed them for bass-lines and beats, often from R&B records, and not for a revolving door of colours that makes any comparisons from Paul’s Boutique to Sgt. Pepper’s earned: it’s the most textural hip-hop album from the 1980s! Ultimately, the brag “Expanding the horizon and expanding the parameters / Expanding the rhymes of sucka MC amateurs” is earned, as is this album becoming a pillar for plunderphonics along with DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… and the Avalanches’ Since I Left You: one for mornings, one for afternoons, and one for the evenings (pretty obvious which is which).

As is the case for De La Soul, the Beastie Boys don’t get enough credit for their rapping. Particularly, the various science references—mixing up real and fake—on “The Sounds of Science” lets them get away with rhyming “Shea Stadium,” “radium” and “Paladium” years before abstract hip-hop became popular. Meanwhile, “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” is full of cultural references, including Clockwork Orange, Rambo and Die Hard in just a few lines. Their smug and confrontational because they’re also punks, so you get details about the group’s predilection for egging people afforded by the massive success of License to Ill, while there’s plenty of rhyming for rhyming’s sake on “Hey Ladies”: “Break up with your girl, it ended in tears / Vincent van Gogh, go and mail that ear.”

I love that “Egg Man” is obviously a Beatles reference but it doesn’t do the obvious thing of sampling that group but it primes you for it, so they save that two songs down on “The Sounds of Science” where the Dust Brothers deploy a bass-line from the most unexpected source ever in “When I’m Sixty-Four” underneath the indelible guitar parts from “The End” and the easy opening of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” (This only covers three of the five Beatles samples on that song. The other two are the title track and reprise of Sgt. Pepper’s, which only solidifies the comparisons.) In addition to time-tested R&B sources like Sly & the Family Stone, Commodores, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, the Dust Brothers pull from also from a ton of classic rock and rap music too. It gets to the point that I don’t mind the 23-second sample for “5-Piece Chicken Dinner” because it just adds to the eclecticism. This ought to be the most influential hip-hop album from the 1980s. Ought to be. It isn’t, simply because sample clearances made it difficult to do something like this, and so no one wants to put in the work that it requires to make an album like this anymore, it seems.

#24. Various Artists - The Indestructible Beat of Soweto (1986)

Apartheid was in place in South Africa for over three decades by the time the twelve songs on The Indestructible Beat of Soweto was recorded, though you wouldn’t know it based on how joyful the songs are. It’s protest music by not letting white oppressors take away their happiness. Ex-patriates Trevor Herman and Jumbo Vanrenen wanted to celebrate the music of their home country, and so released the album through the UK label Earthworks and made these forms of South African black pop music available for the world.

Though the focus of the music is mbaqanga—a style prominent in South Africa since the 1960s that essentially mixed South African and Western styles, including jazz and blues, into effectively pop songs—there are glances at neighboring styles including maskandi (via Moses Mchunu) and isicathamiya (via Ladysmith Black Mambazo); consider this album ‘The Rough Guide to South Africa’ even though it’s focused on Soweto, a township within Johannesburg. It’s diverse enough, with two instrumentals—South African country hoedowns?—in “Sobamba” and Joyce No. 2” to break up the call-and-response the scrumptious guitar lines throughout.

The opening few measures of Udokotela Shange Namajaha’s “Awungilobolele” won me over alone where the cascade of fingerplucked notes seem to “glitch” out before settling into focus as the bass notes come in; the call-and-response melody of Nelcy Sedibe’s following “Holotelani” is the catchiest of the entire album. Malhathini Nkabinde’s bassy vocals lead the addicting stomp of “Emthonjeni Womculo,” and then passes the microphone over to the Mahotella Queens for “Ngicabange Ngaqeda” that sounds like early girl group soul atop South African guitars. The closing song gets passed over to Ladysmith Black Mambazo—who would shortly be made internally famous via Paul Simon’s Graceland—and 5 minute doses seems to be the best setting for their a capella chants.

#23. De La Soul - 3 Feet High and Rising (1989)

When people talk about this record, they seem to always go at it from a blisteringly intellectual perspective. Historically, this record matters: because it presented an alternative to the “harder” hip-hop landscape when it landed, because it introduced the dreaded skit to the hip-hop album; because Prince Paul’s use of sampling here was on a level hitherto unheard of (Paul’s Boutique wouldn’t surface for another few months); because shortly after its release, the Turtles boned them for a reported 1.7 million for using a 12-second sample of “You Showed Me,” forever making it such that labels would have to clear their rappers’ samples before their album releases afterwards. That’s all important, but it often felt like people had forgotten the best thing about the record in the first place, which is that it’s just so darn fun! It’s as colourful as the record cover implies!

The rapping gets undersold: it’s lovably goofy at its worst when Pos bites off more than he can chew on “The Magic Number,” syllable-wise (“And don’t get offended while Mase do-si-do’s your daughter”), and it might be hard to distinguish between the three voices such that “Buddy”—the only track here with rapping features—is a posse cut where it’s hard to remember you’re listening to a posse cut. But Prince Paul is one of the best hip-hop producers of all time, and the rapping never feels stiff with these pulsingly-psychedelic beats. The best example of this is “Eye Know,” taking elements from songs spanning 60s’ soul (Otis Redding and Sly & the Family Stone) all the way to 70s’ jazz-rock (Steely Dan), but whereas a lesser producer might’ve really focused your attention to any one of these things, Prince Paul doesn’t let any individual sample shine such that it’s about the full experience of hearing all of them at once.

It’s too long—strangely, mature and darker sophomore De La Soul is Dead is notably longer but it’s slightly better—and it trails off after the sex skit that we can all blame them for. Afrika’s verse on “Buddy” is lame; the drum beat of “This is a Recording 4 Living in a Fulltime Era” sucks the air out of the room (so when I read on the GQ interview that Dave asserts Pos did the beat and not Prince Paul, it all made too much sense); “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” is strangely minimal and doesn’t come off, at least, not for 5 minutes. But up until that point, every track offers up pleasures, whether it’s the hard-hitting rhythm of “The Magic Number” or the bent guitar notes giving way to that indelible bass fill of “Change in Speak” or how “Jenny, lost her favorite penny / So I gave her a dollar / She kissed me … AND I HOLLERED” feels like a hook even though it only happens once on “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge).” Hip-hop would never be this much fun again.

#22. Talking Heads - Remain in Light (1980)

Closer “The Overload” is unanimously been decided to be the weakest song here which contributes to the feeling that there’s a drop-off in the second half, so I’m here to state outright that there’s no drop: this is as consistent as it gets. “The Overload” takes the underlying darkness of the previous songs and goes full-tilt with it; allegedly, it came from the band wanting to make a Joy Division song without ever having heard a Joy Division song, and Byrne channels the dread of Ian Curtis well as he sings about a “gentle collapsing.” It’s the closest thing we’ll ever get to a Brian Eno-produced Joy Division song, and if this is the weakest track on the album, then that’s surely proof that it’s a great album.

What differentiated Talking Heads from all of new wave from the jump was that they were influenced by black music. By contrast, new wave had “purged many of the black-music-related properties […] that innately juiced rock music in the sixties and early seventies” (Simon Reynolds). In the first two albums alone, they played funk and covered soul, and on Remain in Light, Talking Heads took their funky new wave a step further by tracing rhythm back to its source, Africa.

Rather than build songs off of Byrne’s melodies, they jammed out rhythms first and used that as the foundation. The groove-centric approach makes for Talking Heads’ most consistent album, compounded further by Brian Eno’s detailed production. Eno, who began working with the Heads on More Songs, didn’t really do much for the band until Fear of Music, where he gave the band an atmospheric backdrop that was befitting for the content. Here, he’s a full-fledged member—making his loss on the self-produced Speaking in Tongues so much more pronounced—and he makes the album feel like water. Water flowing underground. There are great moments abound—“Take a look at these hands!” David Byrne shouts as if experiencing an out of body moment on “Born Under Punches”; Adrian Belew’s guitar solo channeling Robert Fripp at the end of “The Great Curve”; the mid-life suburban crisis explored by the simple switch of “And you may find yourself in a beautiful house / With a beautiful wife” to “This is not my beautiful house!” and “That is not my beautiful wife!” on “Once in a Lifetime”—but it all fits within the greater context of this album’s wave of water.

#21. Kate Bush - The Dreaming (1982)

The album plays like the cover, like you’re dancing with someone and you catch a glimpse of something—someone?—far off, and by the time your partner has finished spinning you around, that something is gone, forcing you to ponder if it was just your imagination. Songs shift in ways that ought to be disorienting but aren’t, testimony to her talents in composing and production; it’s her first album to be entirely self-produced. Her voice—alternatingly shrill in the high pitch and raspy in the opposite extreme—sometimes gets overdubbed into a strange, unfeminine mass. Gone are the guitar solos and rock heft of her early records, replaced entirely by her new love for the Fairlight CMI synthesizer which she used to build up increasingly fascinating and weird textures. Given all of these aspects, it should be no surprise to anyone that The Dreaming sold less than its predecessors (though it charted fine, reaching #3 on the UK charts). But the album feels far more special and uniquely hers than her previous albums.

Kate Bush came from a linage of prog rock—her debut album had financial backing from David Gilmour—or at the very least, prog-adjacent artists, and The Dreaming features many conceptual tracks. On the Eberhard Weber-supported “Houdini,” for example, she sings from the perspective of Harry Houdini’s wife who attempted to communicate with her husband in the afterlife (Bush: “after his death his wife made several attempts to contact her dead husband, and on one occasion he did come through to her”), and the shift in her voice from “With a kiss, I’d pass the key / And feel your tongue”—sexual and romantic—to “With your spit still on my lip YOU HIT THE WATER”—terrifying—is seismic. (Bush purposefully ruined her voice with chocolate to get that effect.) Immediately afterwards, “Get Out of My House”—inspired by her love of horror, which would continue into Hounds of Love—features her screaming the title’s words and imitating a mule to similarly stunning effect.

My two favourite songs come early. The first is “There Goes a Tenner” where she starts the song as if she were the enthusiastic D&D Dungeon Master rallying up her team to rob a bank over broken piano chords, but the song gets progressively weirder (“You blow the safe up / Then all I know is I wake up, covered in rubble / One of the rabble needs mummy”) until it becomes clear the job is botched, “Not until they let me see my solicitor.” The second is “Suspended in Gaffa,” whose chamber section—“I don’t know why I’m crying / Am I suspended in gaffa?—made me realize one of the universe’s great truths, which is that we are all suspended in gaffa.