1980, The Year in Review, P2

I’m of the belief that there is always good music being produced, somewhere, and that no one time period is significantly better than any other.  That said, 1980 was a pretty damned good year.  Here are six more terrific albums to prove it.

Six More Albums, for
My Top 12 Albums of 1980

As always, you can jump to the playlist at the bottom of each post to listen while you read.

Within each tier (Top 6, Next 6, etc.), all albums are listed roughly chronologically (all release dates from Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted).

The Feelies
Crazy Rhythms

Released 1980/04

Crazy Rhythms was a difficult find when I was in college. I had a copy of The Good Earth, which I loved, but I knew Crazy Rhythms was the critics’ choice of all the Feelies’ albums. It had something of a legendary status among some sources. But I couldn’t get ahold of it, in any of the new or used record stores in town. Finally, during my last year of college, I found a copy in the college radio station (of course) when I visited a fried who had a shift. I made a tape.

The album almost lived up to its billing. The band had become plenty more melodic and fluid by the time they released The Good Earth; here, it’s more percussive, all about riding a frenetic rhythm-guitar groove. But what a groove it is—primitive, hypnotic, trance-inducing. Great stuff.

From the opening plinks and gradual development of “The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness” and and the catchy “Fa Ci-La,” to the mildly discordant charmer “Forces at Work” and the insistent title track, everything clicks here. The band locks in and rides the rhythm like a suburban choo-choo. Throughout, the tuneful guitar playing contrasts nicely with the crisp, pleasantly jittery beat beneath.

It all seems straight out of the 1969-era Velvet Underground playbook, as if the band spent their entire adolescence with “What Goes On” and “Beginning to See the Light” on repeat, and simply took it a step further. And that’s pretty damned nice, if you ask me. I was glad to have finally found the album.

Nowadays, of course, if you’re looking for an album, it’s pretty much right there at your fingertips. Spotify has almost everything, and Apple Music (or iTunes, to a luddite like myself) surely has the rest. It’s an extremely rare occurrence nowadays to have difficulty finding something, which is great, but also a shame. It takes the thrill of the search away, now, doesn’t it? And that’s actually an important part of the thrill of discovery.

X
Los Angeles

Released 1980/04/26

I’m not a huge X fan, but on Los Angeles, at least, I find them absolutely undeniable. John Doe’s steady monotone forms a solid underpinning for Exene Cervenka’s shouted excess (some might even call it wailing) to create a uniquely orchestrated discord that is key to appreciating X’s sound.

Whether cranking out sassy punk rock kiss-offs like “Your Phone’s Off the Hook but you’re Not,” or slowing it down to the glorious, churning grind of “Nausea”, X sounds like no other band out there. While Prince was out celebrating the funked-up fun of Minneapolis, X found themselves mired in the dark underbelly of L.A., a world of sexual violence, racial prejudice, crippling poverty juxtaposed with obscene wealth—and everywhere, betrayal and decadence.

An American punk landmark, Los Angeles forms an essential part of any punk and alt-rock collection.

Echo and the Bunnymen
Crocodiles

Released 1980/07/18

I am perfectly aware that Echo and the Bunnymen’s Crocodiles has more to offer in mood and style than in actual substance. I probably shouldn’t rank the album so high—yet there’s something about it that I just love.

Case in point: I have no idea what “Monkeys” means, and I don’t care—for me, it’s all about the sound. Whenever I hear that trebly, clanging guitar chime I want to hear it over and over again. It’s like a toned-down version of the shrill guitar wash of PIL’s classic “Public Image” single, with a touch of the warbling groove of “Seventeen Seconds”-era Cure. You hear this sound in early U2, too, but I like it better here.

The U2 comparison is fitting, in fact. Vocalist Ian McCulloch’s voice has the same pleading, earnest quality as Bono, and both the singer and band sound remarkably similar. It could definitely be argued that Echo had the upper hand at this point, although that would change in just a few short years.

For the time being, the songs here rock and rage and surge and swell masterfully, full of brooding dark Romanticism. McCulloch loves to wallow in his own despair, and the band pulls off the music so well you are more than happy to wallow with him. (But here, then, is the reason U2 eventually eclipsed Echo—U2’s ethos of hope had more places to go than the tortured depths of one man’s psyche.)

I got Crocodiles sometime during my senior year of high school, I believe, although I have no idea how I found out about it—and it has continued to be one of my favorite turn-of-the-decade UK post-punk albums ever since. As is typical with me and British post-punk, I love this album, Echo’s first, and I like their subsequent albums less and less as the synths start to eclipse the guitar and overproduction smoothes out the rough edges.

Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band
Doc at the Radar Station

Released 1980/08

The deranged blues-rock absurdity of Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, is an acquired taste. Angular, edgy, rhythmically off-kilter, it can be off-putting and excessive at best—at times savage, or weighted with bizarre poetic ramblings.

Yet it can be damned funny, and oddly endearing. Especially late in his career, Beefheart learned to at least partially balance his wild eccentricities with a touch of accessibility, most notably on the brassy, fun Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) and here, on the more jagged, primitive Doc at the Radar Station.

A catchy guitar hook propels the irresistibly weird “Sue Egypt” as surely as the zigzag surge of “Hot Head” throws you off the rails. “Ashtray Heart” and “Dirty Blue Gene” are some of Beefheart’s most fiercely addictive songs ever.

And not only is the music distinctive. The memorable lines come fast and furious, too: “You used me like an ashtray heart / Case of the punks, right from the start.” “Old women sweat / Young girls glisten.” “She’s not bad / She’s just genetically mean.” I could go on. “Somebody’s had to much to think” could almost be a slogan for his entire oeuvre. And then there’s the barely restrained insanity of “Telephone” and the bizarre poetry of “Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on My Knee.”

Trout Mask Replica, from way back in 1969, may be the undisputed, influential classic, but it’s quite possible that Shiny Beast (1978) and Doc at the Radar Station are better.

Prince
Dirty Mind

Released 1980/10/08

The Prince of Dirty Mind isn’t the great experimenter he would later be, but for now he lays down some seriously silly funk jams, complete with trebly synth riffs; and he sings his trademark comic-erotica in a sick, slick falsetto.

Prince confesses the depravity of his thoughts, explains just how he wants to spend his entire night, gets his heart broken once again, heads off a virgin bride on her way to her wedding, gets filthy with his older sister, and chooses to party up uptown with the freaks rather than go to war. His gender-bending appearance and effeminate falsetto add to the charm and further his mission of a completely open, free sexuality. Once you’ve heard Prince’s original version of “When You Were Mine,” you won’t go back to Cyndi Lauper’s (at least if you heard her cover first, like me).

A simply perverse joy from start to finish, Dirty Mind is not to be missed.

Listen to more Prince.

Dire Straits
Making Movies

Released 1980/10/17

The Romantic splendor of Making Movies is a far cry from the straightforward shuffle of Dire Straits laid-back, mostly minimal debut. But the flowing sweep of “The Sultans of Swing” had already shown that they could go epic, and epic they went for Making Movies, at least for one side.

The sprawling trio of songs that comprise Making Movies’ Side A—“Tunnel of Love,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Skateaway”—just might represent the pinnacle of their career. Here, the band expands their songs into extended jams that swell and surge in all the right ways. Mark Knopfler’s guitar runs gloriously free throughout, and his husky voice knows when to play it rough and when to be gentle.

If Side B was a little less ambitious, it still had the nice rocker “Expresso Love” and the tender closer “Les Boys,” which probably pokes fun at gays (homophobia alert!) but somehow manages to feel empathetic at the same time. (Certainly, the biggest butt of the joke is the closeted businessmen to drive out to the cabarets.)

Later, I feel, Dire Straits would give in to the sentiment a touch too much, but on Making Movies they get it just right. I played this a lot back in high school and I got to hear it plenty more when the guys across the hall my freshman year in college would blast it out of their speakers all afternoon (the same guys who blasted Joy Division, believe it or not).

Here’s the entire 1980: The Year in Review playlist for you—three tracks per album.

A note on the sequence:  normally, I sequence these year in review playlists in chronological order.  I tried that with 1980, and it sounded awful.  So I re-sequenced it for a better listen.  With a few exceptions, I’ve gathered the British post-punk stuff toward the front of the playlist and pushed the American stuff—which feels entirely of a different character—toward the end.

Enjoy!

More 1980, The Year in Review

More Years in Review of the 1980s…

Cover Art Citations:

• Crazy Rhythms: By The cover art can be obtained from Stiff., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1127877
• Los Angeles: Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2662035
• Crocodiles: By May be found at the following website: https://www.allmusic.com/album/r6560, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1133344
• Doc at the Radar Station: By scanned from CD insert, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8748673
• Dirty Mind: By Prince / Warner Bros. Records – https://albumartexchange.com/coverart/gallery/pr/princegroup3_dirtymind_c916.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64303520
• Making Movies: By Blackcat – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52526499