The “best albums of all time” lists abound on the Internet - some of them interesting, some of them as surreal and beside-the-point as a VH1 countdown. But rather than add my own top 80s rock/pop albums (the first half of the decade’s a kind of musical center of gravity for me), I thought I’d try something different and come up with albums that for some reason have been or currently are overlooked. Some are obscure, some aren’t. Some of them used to be critical darlings that never sold well and have been swept aside by more recent music fashions. Some of them are cut-out bin stuffers that don’t deserve their fate. And some of them are inexplicably forgotten gems.
Let me start with one in the last category,
The Sound: Jeopardy. You can see how this band were postpunk’s also-rans. They lacked a marketable schtick and in fact seemed to borrow at times from Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Chameleons, etc. But when the music’s this good, the lack of an original voice is almost beside the point. The first track, “Can’t Escape Myself” is worth the price of purchase alone, a reworking of sorts of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” that ratchets up the dynamics and the bar-chord assault. “Heyday” has a tightly wound dueling guitar line that leads into its chorus. And the rest of the tracks are just as great, all the better for not being overly familiar. Currently, the CD of the album is available only as an import, and the vinyl is going for increasing sums on eBay. Snag it while you can.
Simple Minds: Real to Real Cacophony. Maybe it was the silly title or the dark-blue minimalist cover. Maybe it was the fact that the cut-out bin always had twelve obviously unwanted copies. But hearing other early Simple Minds albums suggested a band both sonically ahead of its time and highly evocative of a certain moment’s excitement in experimentation. They’re all worth a listen, but this one is their first great one, and it’s a forgotten classic. Pared-down angular rock is paired with otherworldly synthesizer counterpoint. “Carnival” out-XTC’s XTC. “Changeling” should be playing at every electroclash dance night. “Scar” is one of the best album closers I can remember. And the instrumentals (like “Film Theme”) are even good. For two bucks, what do you have to lose?
Eurythmics: 1984. The soundtrack to a movie I’ve never seen, this is Eurythmics at their artiest - half instrumental, tribal-percussive and moody. This kind of overreach has sunk many a pop-rock band’s pet project, but having dug this one out recently from the recesses of my record collection, I can’t believe how well it holds up. And the best songs aren’t even the single (”Sexcrimes”) released from it: “Doubleplusgood” features a great electric organ sound and the haunting “For the Love of Big Brother” has a wonderful fade out into a steady drum beat. Who knew that Morcheeba’s playbook was written ten years earlier?
Game Theory: Big Shot Chronicles. The long lost Let’s Active album, it was even produced by Mitch Easter. Whereas their following album Lolita Nation would turn up the Big Star quotient to good effect, here are 12 concise gems summarizing the best of 80s alternative rock, alternately fun and serious, muscular and nuanced, from the perfect power pop opener (”Here It Is Tomorrow”) to the crescendoing ballad ending (”Like a Girl Jesus”). The CD releases of their LPs are all stratospherically-priced, but that probably attests to lack of a re-release rather than legions of Game Theory fans out there. I’d like to be wrong on that.
Soup Dragons: Hang Ten. By now the Madchester days are seeming a distant hysteria, but here are Scotland’s entry before they became baggy. No psychedelic wash here, just Buzzcocks-worthy songs that clock in under two minutes, til they expend their sound on the last few songs for a proto-Britpop anthemic ring. What’s best is that this C-86-era band was released on a major label, so you can actually find it in records stores.
Uzi: Sleep Asylum. Thalia Zedek’s 80s incarnation before she went on to form Come in the 90s. Sleep Asylum is not as tight or well-crafted as a Come record, but even here the dirge-blues-punk is in full formation. Judging from the number of copies I see lying around, this piece of Boston musical history is waiting to be rediscovered.
Bongos: Drums Along the Hudson. These guys were too much a rocking postpunk act to achieve mainstream success and too suburban New Jersey in their demeanor to have much rock cred. Pigeonholed as 60s retro, the surprise of Drums is how much more there is to the music. “In the Congo” is one of the best dance-rock songs ever. “Glow in the Dark” is Apples in Stereo years before their time. Even the cheesy lyrics of “Zebra Club” don’t dampen the melancholy of Richard Barone’s singing. Oh, and hardly anyone’s rediscovered them yet.
Go-Go’s: Talk Show. OK, the Go-Go’s are hardly overlooked, with a Behind the Music special coming out seemingly every few months. And this one does have one of their biggest hits. Still, it’s an album that most fans seem to like least and that casual listeners don’t own at all. For one thing, it’s when their fun, campy tongue-in-cheek gave way to something without quotation marks, when the LA punk girls finally decided to take being pop stars seriously. For another thing, the plodding production just about kills half the songs. But hearing their live versions (on Beyond the Valley…) made me realize that they were great songs and encouraged me to give Talk Show another chance. And it reveals itself with repeated listens.
Modern English: After the Snow. Generally bought simply for the hit “I Melt with You,” the album as a whole is actually good. The opening track, “Someone’s Calling,” is the winner, with a jerky drum beat matched with chiming guitars. “Tables Turning” has frenetic layered guitar that would do the Wedding Present proud. Some of the rest is downtempo, but even those work. And then there’s the hit, if you’re not sick of it by now.
Fleshtones: Roman Gods. Not a recent discovery but an album that sustained me through rainy Knoxville winters during college. For those who remember, the Fleshtones were best known for their 60s garage-Motown-fratrock hybrid: lots of call-and-response, synchronized stage movements, and “race music” covers. Hexbreaker would be their magnum opus in this kind of party rock, but for the album before, Roman Gods, they tried a different tack, gathering Farfisa organs, vacuum tube amps, and lots of vintage recording equipment and crafting an atmospheric, layered sound. It’s probably the perfect early-80s synthesis of British postpunk experimentation and American musical idiom.
All right, enough for now. There’s definitely room for more, and maybe I can add some as I think of them, or as my friends recommend new old music to me. Feel free to add your suggestions, too.
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