Come see why 1983 has restored my faith in the entire decade, as new wave goes mainstream and heavy metal changes direction for good.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone un-turned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #17 in the series. My random number generator tells me that the next year to explore is 1990!
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1983
This is the third year in the 80’s that I have tackled for Found or Forgotten, and the first two were among the least impressive years I’ve yet covered. Thankfully, I found 1983 to be a better than average vintage, brimming with creativity and outstanding individual songs as well as a rock-solid top ten. I will say that my honorable mentions section remains sparse for the decade, indicating that no matter how great the best albums are, things tended to drop off quickly. I think this is a function of where the various musical genres were on their respective journeys. By 1983, jazz had been pretty much abandoned as a popular art form in America. Country music was as prevalent as ever, but far from the stripped down and rugged sensibility of mid-70’s outlaw country that speaks to me most directly. Meanwhile, soul music was a shadow of itself in the wake of disco, and hip hop was still a year away from its first great album.
What the year does offer is nothing to scoff at, however. New wave had evolved in thrilling new ways, while at the same time integrating more fully with mainstream pop. Hard rock was going strong thanks to the yeoman’s effort of AC/DC, Twisted Sister, ZZ Top and the like. We had the first real thrash metal record, and the pinnacle of faux-metal rock music. Overall, it might be the most fun year of music I’ve reviewed, even if it’s not the best. So buckle in, weirdos, let’s do this one more time…
Speaking in Tongues – Talking Heads
If this was the Talking Heads’ big crossover album, and that fact has been well-documented at this point, then it’s a testament to the band’s chops and songwriting that they were able to turn such wild blast of imagination into a commercial success. Look at the big hit, album-opener “Burnin’ Down the House”. It’s sci-fi funk music with an intro that sounds like a spaceship descending down to earth, and an outro that is right out of Close Encounters. The songs’ layered percussion makes it seem three-dimensional, almost cavernous. The lyrics probably make sense to David Byrne, but he’s likely the only one:
All wet! Hey you might need a raincoat. Shakedown! Dreams walking in broad daylight. Three hun-dred six-ty five de-grees! Burning down the house
This is a song that was popular at parties? Including the jocks’ big frat party in Revenge of the Nerds? It almost seems impossible, except that you can’t listen to it without wiggling your butt in your seat, and I have to resist the urge to pump my fist at that 365 degrees part, so I guess it only doesn’t make sense if you think about it. And the Talking Heads aren’t trying to get you to think with this one, at least not as the first order. Much like George Clinton, whose concert chants inspired the chorus of “Burnin’ Down the House” (and possibly that spaceship vibe), the Heads are adhering to the credo “Free your mind and your ass will follow”.
This is the first album without the services of genius producer/weirdo Brian Eno, and while that departure would eventually harm the band, the halo of his wildly fertile time with them has extended to Speaking in Tongues. You can drop in for any 10 second snippet and there is going to be something incredibly interesting going on. That depth I described earlier is present throughout the album, such that it feels like sounds are coming from all over. There is no point in even trying to place the guitar, or bass, etc. The Talking Heads were the world’s best rock band at the moment, bar none, yet they barely sounded like a rock band at all. It’s not possible to watch them perform a song like “Girlfriend is Better” in Jonathon Demme’s documentary Stop Making Sense (based on the tour for this album), however, and consider it anything but a great rock tune. “Swamp” is just as warped as anything else on the album, but the chorus has the drunken warble of the Doors’ best bar-band blues songs. Byrne sings with so much urgency throughout the album that he carries you through on the edge of your seat, never completely dropping the anxious tension that fueled the band’s earlier works. It closes on the lovely “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”, which brings us down from the previous eight tracks of crazy funk music, perfectly capping off the whole endeavor.
There is not a moment of Speaking in Tongues that doesn’t sound animated and inspired. It probably isn’t their best album, but it’s one that I feel gets overlooked as a classic of its time. I “tentatively” slotted it in as my number one as I was compiling the list of music that was released in ’83, and it remained my unwavering choice ever since. This is also an album that, despite its idiosyncrasy, I have a hard time imagining it won’t appeal to most people, especially those that are reading a music blog.
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High Land, Hard Rain – Aztec Camera
High Land, Hard Rain represents my favorite aspect of Found or Forgotten. I had never heard of the album, or Aztec Camera, before I started looking into 1983. It is an important album in some circles, but obscure enough that it could have conceivably stayed off my radar for the rest of my life. Thanks to this project, I am now familiar with a previously undiscovered classic and enamored with its considerable charms. In case you are as ignorant of the group as I recently was, they are a Scottish new wave band that was active through the mid-90’s, and this is their first release. The music leans more pop than new wave to me, but remains starkly different than American pop from the time. There are a few signifiers, like bandleader Roddy Frame’s vocal that echoes acts like Tears for Fears and Elvis Costello, but you won’t hear any synthesizer, saxophone or drum machines. Instead, the band deploys a straight-forward salvo of jangly guitars and a traditional rhythm section. Instead of dancing, the premier subject du jour among early 80’s song crafters, High Land, Hard Rain is full of well-crafted, romantic tunes about being in love. It isn’t quite as magical as XTC’s Skylarking (1986), but it is sturdier. All thirteen tracks are meticulously crafted, yet remain uncomplicated. The delightful “We Could Send Letters”, for example, might have some studio shimmer, but there’s nothing about the basic structure that hasn’t been around since the 50’s. “Release” starts as a simple ballad with spare instrumentation, but achieves dynamism through its subtly shifting tempo. “Haywire” gets a lot of mileage out of its slight discordance, thanks to the soothing and harmonious material that precedes it, driving home the song’s central theme. I can see how it didn’t take the world by storm when it was released, given how at odds it seems with the prevailing tide of music, but High Land, Hard Rain is an incredibly assured debut. It may be the most charming work I’ve come across so far.
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Kill ‘Em All – Metallica
Kill ‘Em All was a monumental step change in the development of heavy metal. In many ways, it feels the same to me as Are You Experienced? does in the context of mid-60’s rock and roll. The metal of the late 70’s and early 80’s can be great, but it never approached this level of speed and aggression. Sure, Slayer’s first album also dropped in ’83, but Metallica is just tighter, faster and more fully formed at this point. The release of this album marks the moment in history when we could stop debating whether Van Halen or AC/DC were metal. For the rest of the decade, at least, this was heavy metal, and anything else that didn’t approximate it was hard rock at best. On “Motorbreath”, James Hetfield sings “Don’t stop for nothin’, it’s full speed or nothin’”, and that pretty much sums up the band’s mission statement at this point. The idea was simply sheer brutality delivered as economically as possible. The jackhammer rhythm section of Cliff Burton and Lars Ulrich provide the foundation, then Kirk Hammet propels the band’s sound into overdrive with his muscular riffs and break-neck solos. Hammet would go on to add texture and nuance in subsequent albums, but here he channels Dave Mustaine (who co-wrote several tracks before being jettisoned from the group, famously too big of an asshole for a handful of guys renowned for being assholes) and speed is clearly the lone objective. The only time the album takes a breath is during the Black-Sabbath-on-quaaludes bass freak out “Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)”, which is the genesis for Cliff Burton being deified by thousands of black-clad teenagers in the 80’s. Metallica will still reach higher heights on these countdowns, and no one except the most devoted purists will call the band’s debut their best album, but it does boast killer tracks like “Hit the Lights”, “Seek and Destroy” and “The Four Horsemen” which make it a contender for the greatest metal albums of all time. More than any individual song, though, it’s the album’s status as a harbinger of a new era of heavy metal that lands it so high on my list.
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She’s So Unusual – Cindy Lauper
Pop music has the ability to fall anywhere along the spectrum of timeless to purely ephemeral. On one end is the Beatles. On the other end is something like “The Macarena”, which will only have a lasting impact on our culture inasmuch as lazy comedies need a music cue to signify “late 90’s” during flashback sequences. It can be tricky to figure out which is which when pop is first released, however. Cindy Lauper, with her affiliation with both the Goonies and WWF’s Captain Lou Albano, certainly seemed destined to be confined to her era when considering her importance. Yet, great songs are great songs, and She’s So Unusual survives as much more than a peculiar document of the early 80’s.
What comes through immediately is Lauper’s unique voice, and by that I don’t mean the way she sings, but her clearly defined point of view. As if the title weren’t a tip-off, she is passionate about embracing individuality and shunning judgement. In and of itself, that is a timeless conceit, but the way she goes about it actually fits into our current cultural climate more than it must have two and a half decades ago. “She Bop” is famously about masturbation, which isn’t something many artists (particularly female artists) discuss in their music even today. “When You Were Mine” takes an ambiguously genderless Prince performance and turns it into a queer love song, at a time in history when the world still assumed that Elton John was straight. Beyond the inclusive nature of the material, those are both just really good performances. At a brief 39 minutes, there is no time for a bad song, and Lauper is able to compile an impressive string of great pop tunes. Chief among them are “All Through the Night”, which is probably her least celebrated masterpiece, and “Time After Time”, which is the one song that even the skeptics reading this will admit is an all-time classic. That’s not even counting the massive single that launched her career, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, which actually holds up better than you might imagine. She’s So Unusual was a classic as soon as it was released, and remains an absolute joy to this day.
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Porcupine – Echo & the Bunnymen
Even more than great albums, 1983 was a year of great songs. “Photograph”, “Burning Down the House”, “King of Pain”, “Time After Time”… these are all classics that stand the test of time. While not as famous as their most popular song, “Killing Moon”, Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Cutter” deserves billing along with those other superlative works. It kicks off Porcupine in grand fashion, with a blend of gothic beauty, new wave tension and a sense of danger that is emblematic of the entire album. The band employs an impressive array of instruments and sounds here to create something epic in scope. Each track is complex and perhaps feels longer than it is, but there is a tremendous forward momentum throughout the album that is akin to a tidal wave, so you never really get a chance to catch your breath. I don’t have any idea what Ian McCulloch is singing about (even after reading the lyrics), but his dramatic delivery makes all of it seem profound. Ultimately this is a big-sounding album, both in depth of sonic textures but also in its scope and tone. The eighties takes a lot of heat for a perceived creative deficiency in its music, but albums like Porcupine and others in my top 10 offer a major challenge to that perception.
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Synchronicity – The Police
There is an anxious energy that fuels many of the year’s top ten albums (e.g. Speaking in Tongues, Porcupine). Perhaps none are as jittery as Synchronicity, however. Lacking any of the faux-reggae of the band’s earlier work, the album is a coiled spring, full of energy but tightly controlled. Tracks like “Synchronicity I” and “Oh My God” crackle and hum, while “Mother” is downright unsettling. When the group slows down a bit, they not only offer a needed respite but also deliver some of their best tracks. “Every Breath You Take” is notoriously creepy from a lyrical perspective, but it also sounds remarkably tender. For as little as I can be bothered with Sting’s post-Police output, he is undeniably a great rock singer, and the group’s most famous song is pretty much carried by his vocal. “King of Pain”, meanwhile, is my favorite Police song. It builds really well and is beautifully sung, and the lyrical construction is top notch. The second verse replicates the first, with the addition of a soft “that’s my soul up there” after every line, to bring the sadness of the song into focus (e.g. “There’s a little black spot on the sun today (that’s my soul up there)”) As you break down the album song-by-song, it’s pretty harrowing material, yet it was popular enough to win three Grammys at the time and it remains incredibly listenable to this day.
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Pyromania – Def Leppard
Pyromania is the third studio album of Def Leppard’s career, and while I haven’t yet heard the first two releases which marked them as NWOBHM pioneers, they were largely miscast as a heavy metal band at this point. The material here has some edge, but this is arena rock, pure and simple. “Photograph”, the best song the band ever recorded, is practically pop music and certainly nothing that occupies the same musical orbit as Kill ‘Em All. Most tracks start off similar to their hard rock contemporaries like the Scorpions or Quiet Riot, but then have a little sweetener built in around the bridge that turn them towards Journey or Boston. It’s a great formula, but one that would water down their next album a little too much (call it the “Mutt Lange Effect”.) Pyromania stays consistent, though. In addition to “Photograph”, you have heavier crowd-pleasers like “Too Late for Love”, “Foolin'” and “Rock of Ages”, and no duds threatening to stall the momentum. There is a reason it was a massive commercial success, and that’s because it is all so damn accessible. Hard enough for rockers, with hooks for days, and more sophisticated than what hair metal would become in a few short years. When you are this middle-of-the-road, you’re going to isolate the some people, especially when your music is mislabeled as something it’s not. Nevertheless, it’s hard to picture a rock album that is much more universally pleasing than this one.
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Holy Diver – Dio
Since I spent time earlier in this post praising Kill ‘Em All for changing the heavy metal paradigm, it’s only fitting that the countdown includes one of the last great examples of the style it was replacing. Holy Diver is a silly album. It has silly cover art1,2 that renders its album title silly once you see it. It has lyrics like “In the palace of the virgin lies the chalice of the soul”. In many ways, it is a prime example of why the genre needed a reboot in the first place. Yet, it is a lot of fun. That isn’t to say you can’t have fun listening to Metallica, of course you can, but you can also treat it as very serious and important. A lot of kids in my generation, or perhaps a few years older, did just that in the 80’s. With Dio, you don’t have the option to take it seriously, it is only meant to be fun, and much like I explained in my 1982 post, I see a lot of value in that. Beyond being amusing, it is also full of great songs, which is really the only criteria that matters. Sonically, the band pulls off some unique tricks here. The album heavily incorporates synthesizers and keyboards yet suffers no loss of heaviness or credibility. A song like “Rainbow in the Dark” is not too terribly far removed “The Final Countdown”, but it remains beloved instead of the national musical punchline that particular Europe song is. It’s only just over forty minutes, but Holy Diver doesn’t squander any of them with nine rollicking tracks, and for all of its silliness it remains revered in the genre that quickly left it behind.
1 – Look, I’m Christian and have friends who are pastors, but even if that weren’t the case I wouldn’t look at that image of a drowning priest and think “cool!”. That said, Dio is in a genre that trades in shock value, and while there are metal acts that have a legit tie to the Satanic/occult, Dio is not one of them.
2 – In a marvelous bit of back-pedaling, Ronnie James Dio has intimated in interviews that the picture could actually be a priest killing a devil, and not to judge a book by its cover. So… okay. Whatever you say, Shyamalan.
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Rebel Yell – Billy Idol
I’m formulating a theory that irony is killing rock music. If you read my 2017 recap, you’ll recall that I lamented the lack of decent rock and roll in recent years. I may have found the culprit. Now, irony has been a part of rock at least since the late sixties, sometimes charmingly so (the Beatles), sometimes noxiously (Frank Zappa). At some point in the post-grunge 90’s, however, I think we reached a tipping point, and it started becoming unclear which artists were sincere, which were ironic, and which were buried under so many layers of irony that they were somehow sincere again. I’m sure we will revisit this topic together in future posts, but the genesis of the idea came from listening to Rebel Yell.
Billy Idol is not a nuanced performer, and while this is surprisingly strong material, there is an undeniable element of camp associated with it. It works, and is in fact a terrific success, because Idol attacks each song like he means it. Had there been a hint of winking at the audience, an idea that he wasn’t taking it seriously, the whole thing could have potentially collapsed. So even an over-heated, sleazy tune like “Flesh for Fantasy” resonates because Idol wills you to take it at face value. The production does some heavy lifting, as well. Its chock full of neon, Blade Runner vibes which tie it specifically to it’s time period, but don’t diminish its ability to entertain in the slightest. Of course the title track is a classic, but the album is also full of under-heard gems like “Catch My Fall” and “(Do Not) Stand in the Shadows” that wouldn’t sound out of place on several of the year’s top ten albums. This was probably not an album I expected to land on my list, but I’m glad I gave it a chance.
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Power, Corruption & Lies – New Order
If there was a metacritic 35 years ago, then I’m pretty sure this album would have been considered the best of the year. It certainly popped up on a number of “Best of” lists I perused during my research. It is a combination of the gothic, post-punk music of Joy Division (the surviving members of which formed New Order) and dance/electronic-oriented new wave. That is a tangle of musical styles that I am generally lukewarm on, at best, but even I can start to appreciate the influence of this record. As recently as this decade, Daft Punk, Neon Indian and LCD Soundsystem seem to owe a distinct debt, not to mention older acts like the Cure and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Now, like I said, this type of music is not really my bailiwick, so I don’t know precisely how Television or Wire or whoever was actually a much bigger influence or if there is some lesser known album that does this particular aesthetic better, etc. That’s really not what this blog is about (well it kind of is, but I aim to discover these connections organically, not through loads of internet research.) Suffice it to say that this certainly feels like an important record, and a quite enjoyable one on top of that. What I generally find is that I can understand the appeal of most acclaimed albums, even if they don’t appeal specifically to me. Power, Corruption and Lies actually does appeal specifically to me, despite being a departure from my normal listening habits. Plus, I can’t avoid adding the iconic “Blue Monday” to that running list of great songs from my new favorite year of the 80’s.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock/Metal: You Can’t Stop Rock ‘N Roll – Twisted Sister; War – U2; Power & the Glory – Saxon; Shout at the Devil – Motley Crue; Piece of Mind – Iron Maiden; Flick of the Switch – AC/DC; Metal Health – Quiet Riot; Eliminator – ZZ Top; Duck Rock – Malcolm McClaren; Frontiers – Journey; Bark at the Moon – Ozzy Osbourne
Pop/Other: Come Away with ESG – ESG; The Hurting – Tears for Fears; Confrontation – Bob Marley & the Wailers
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