This Year's Model: Elvis Costello and the Attractions
Short blunt punches of power pop. A great lyricist who still preferred musical effect over preciousness in delivery. Didn't always understand the lines but got the songs every time.
Revolver: The Beatles
Before Revolver it was fun and showbiz. After Revolver it was self-indulgence. Revolver was the sound of confidence spiced with invention and all four members on full.
Mezzanine: Massive Attack
The great monument of trip hop, and its final big statement, stretches out like a Stalin era housing project in which there is something different going on in every room. Gigantic and moody, restlessly inventive and perfecty listenable.
Evol: Sonic Youth
A flatmate was given this by a fellow band member and couldn't stop playing it. It spoored to the rest of the house before we knew who it was. I bought the LP and left it on for about ten minutes after the last song, not realising it was an eternal groove as though it was being born and taking over the room.
The Scream: Siouxsie and the Banshees
One of the great debuts. The band started as a gaggle of scenesters getting up at gigs to make noise but transmogrified into a real band with its own sound that influenced new bands worldwide in the same year. Solid songs about alienation, addiction (and not the by-then-cliched heroin but nicotine) and urban darkness and the guts or the cheek to include a Beatles cover at the height of punk. Followers started leading. This is what it sounds like.
Diamond Dogs: David Bowie
He spent a year stretching himself beyond his laurels working on a musical about Orwell's 1984 only to find, when he asked, that the author's estate forbade it. The old side two contains the directly Orwellian material and it's great but feels a little too fragmented (with good reason). The first side is kind of like the crashing decadence that led to the totalitarianism (ie the real work of the project, in other words). Twenty plus minutes of pure sci fi cinema that didn't reflect anything around it.
Colossal Youth: Young Marble Giants
Quietly plaintive songs that mix real pain with absurdism and wrapped in tiny parcels shouldn't please anyone but this has for decades. An album that stays on once it's on.
Nouvelle Vague
I enjoyed folk of my generation getting upset about this, thinking that it was a pisstake on the sacred ground of the post punk era. The joke did go three ways (Nouvelle Vague is French for New Wave and Bossa Nova) but it was pretty much kept to the band name. The execution brought out the musical essence in songs from a time when that quality was being very publicly downplayed by the cultural leaders. The best of it aches along with the spirit of the originals and its success is that the musical difference is transcended.
Loveless: My Bloody Valentine
Pure force of invention born of a very short run up that changed what guitar bands sounded like for a decade. Silken textures emerge from the gutters and the meteorological roars and the flow, torn and viscous though it gets, continues. It's possible that the music here can generate dreams.
Fever Ray
In 2009 I went foraging for recent music that would support the talk after the screening on my film nights in Collingwood. I needed something that added to the hubbub but also sounded good in the gaps. As soon as I had my first proper listen I considered it far too good for that and soon after knew that I needed something far too good. Great electronic music from half of The Knife that travels from spooky to grand and back beyond spooky to lightlessly troubling.
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