Junkyard
The Birthday Party
1982
The farther and farther you go into Nick Cave’s musical past, the crazier and crazier the music tends to get. Long before the Bad Seeds existed, Australia’s favorite gothic cowboy fronted the volatile Birthday Party, purveyors of sharp, shattered post-punk chaos. With Cave’s gurgling and wailing up front, it’s easy to miss the instrumental genius churning behind him, from Rowland S. Howard’s piercing guitar to Tracy Pew’s swaggering bass. The Birthday Party only survived long enough to release a couple of albums and a handful of EPs, but those few recordings became a cornerstone for anyone interested in extreme, dark music. So, in other words, just about every alternative musician from the 80s.
#19
Ocean Rain
Echo & The Bunnymen
1984
Ocean Rain contains, hands down, the most tasteful string sections of the entire decade. While there were scores of bands throwing great dollops of violins all over their music whenever they wanted to sound emotional, no band can match the bright rays of violin-flavored sunshine that illuminate “Silver”, or the gentle, sighing cello hiding in the back of this album’s title track. The Bunnymen had already released three great albums prior to Ocean Rain, but this album was the first where the Liverpool lads sounded completely comfortable with themselves and their music. Without any internal doubts holding them back, they delivered a gorgeously romantic post-punk classic, strings and all.
#18
Shoot Out The Lights
Richard & Linda Thompson
1982
There's something very uncomfortable about listening to Shoot Out The Lights, since you’re hearing two people ending a decade-long marriage. Although the songs were supposedly written before Richard and Linda started to have problems, titles like “Don’t Renege On Our Love” and “Man In Need” certainly don’t make this album feel like a nice, fuzzy, “let’s-talk-our-problems-out” therapy session. However, if you’ve got no qualms about listening to other people’s pain, Shoot Out The Lights is jaw-dropping. Richard Thompson stakes his claim as the only guitar hero who doesn’t make solos insufferable boring and both he and Linda have astonishing vocal turns. Highlights include Richard’s paranoid “Shoot Out The Lights” and Linda’s broken “Walking On A Wire”, a song so sad that spontaneous weeping is probably the only acceptable way to appreciate it.
#17
Avalon
Roxy Music
1982
There was a time when Roxy Music recorded highly cerebral, avant-garde art-rock. However, by 1982, that was all in the past. Singer and band leader Bryan Ferry had fired almost everyone who had helped Roxy Music find success, instead opting to follow his own private fantasy of becoming the finest crooner of his era. Avalon was certainly a much shinier, adult-oriented work than anything Roxy Music had released previously, but the surprising part is how strange Ferry’s music still sounds. Once you get past the opening salvo of balladry (“More Than This” and “Avalon” particularly), the album is dominated by moody, tension-filled dirges, peaking at the pulsing “The Main Thing”. Avalon was a different sound for Roxy Music, but swapping some of the rough edges for layer upon layer of glistening beauty certainly wasn’t a complete disaster. In fact, it sounds pretty damn gorgeous.
#16
Rum Sodomy & The Lash
The Pogues
1985
The whole “Irish punk rock” thing has become a bit commonplace, with hooligan bands like Flogging Molly and the Dropkick Murphys running rampant and popping up on Martin Scorsese soundtracks. However, all those bands got the formula wrong. While this modern crop is very definitely identifiable as punk (no matter how many accordions happen to be onstage), the Pogues never made such delineations easy. The line they tread between rock and honest-to-Erie traditional Irish music is an incredibly blurry one. With Shane McGowan’s original songs rubbing shoulders with songs whose original writers have been lost to history, Rum Sodomy & The Lash is essentially the most drunk, raucous folk music you’ve ever encountered.
#15
Rain Dogs
Tom Waits
1985
Oh, that voice. You either love it or you cringe whenever you hear it. I happen to be in the former camp, since Tom’s mind-numbingly flexible voice is nothing short of hypnotizing to me. However, Rain Dogs, as an album, generally makes Waits’ voice more palatable. Not because Tom is singing any differently (heaven forbid!), but because the music is just as weird. Rain Dogs was Waits’ second “experimental” record, meaning that instead of drums and pianos, Waits and his musicians would hit tables with two-by-fours until Tom had found a rhythm he could work with. The end result is something that behaves like music as you know it, but sounds like some weird, urban nightmare, with everything you’ve come to associate with rock music being replaced by the rain plunking on pipes or hissing steam creeping up from the sewers underground.
#14
Let It Be
The Replacements
1984
There was no precedent for the Replacements releasing an album as good as Let It Be before 1984. This was a band of Minneapolis bums who played shows impossibly drunk and named their albums Hootenanny. And yet…Let It Be happened. Without warning. And the world was better for it. Suddenly, Paul Westerberg’s slurring, sloppy hard rock transformed itself into charmingly ramshackle anthems for the young and alienated. With solid, honest emotion backing up the album’s most personal tracks, Let It Be is one of the great masterpieces of the 80s American underground and one of the strongest arguments that bands can simply will themselves into being great.
#13
Skylarking
XTC
1986
Somehow, suffering through extreme Valium withdrawal made XTC’s Andy Partridge calmer. I’ll probably never understand just how that worked, but whatever the case, it allowed the pastoral pleasures of Skylarking to see the light of day. Virtually abandoning their punky days of yore wholesale, the band (trimmed to a three-piece over the course of their previous two albums) wove an impressive tapestry of chirping birds, acoustic strumming and songs expressing shock about “the things we used to do on grass.” To everyone’s surprise, including theirs, it ended up becoming a sizeable college radio hit and resuscitated XTC’s flailing career. Never mind that it was the painfully ham-fisted non-album single “Dear God” that won people over. Skylarking benefited from association and that many more people were enriched by listening to this pleasantly winking music.
#12
The Queen Is Dead
The Smiths
1986
It didn’t take Morrissey long to find his niche. The Queen Is Dead is the product of a band firing on all cylinders, with every member contributing exactly what they need to in order to create something legendary. However, this is also the album where Morrissey’s strangely charismatic personality becomes completely irresistible. It’s just not fair to expect sad, misanthropic teenagers the world over to resist the literate, snarky charms of “Cemetary Gates” or the dripping pathos of “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”. Say what you want about Moz being a hopelessly maudlin drama queen who has been lifted up by the overactive emotions of millions of hormonal youngsters, but recognize that Morrissey and the Smiths did it better than anyone had before or since. There’s something undeniably magnetic in their music that multiple generations have felt drawn to.
#11
Doolittle
Pixies
1989
It takes a couple of listens to really get a handle on all the bizarre subject matter that populates Doolittle. Between the shout-outs to Salvador Dali, the honest recitations of Biblical violence and a song titled “Wave Of Mutilation”, it quickly becomes clear that Pixies aren’t exactly your standard, run-of-the-mill indie rock band singing about adolescent disillusionment. However, weirder than all the references to monkeys and sliced eyeballs is the fact that these songs are some of the catchiest, most infectious tunes in the entirety of music history (and you wish that was hypebole). Pixies have become one of the most referenced and influential bands of the past three decades because they managed to do not one, but two different things bands have spent entire careers trying to accomplish: writing unique lyrics and simply creating really, really great songs.
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