The Fourteenth P&J Albums (and EPs) Poll!

Pogues

psychcandy!!!!

o

Probably the weakest year of the decade.

Better than 1985.

If I wasn't going to give it to Prince the next year, I'd say Parade, the one album on this list that gives me the most continuing pleasure. It's between License to Ill or Graceland, oddly.

How is Robert Cray regarded these days? Is Strong Perrsuader really the 12 Songs of contempo-blues as Christgau claimed? I like about half the album without feeling too strongly about them either way (though I burned "Right Next Door (Because of Me)" onto my iPod last week).

I loved the Cray back then, but it probably hasn't held up as well as some of the others on the list.

It's between Beasties, mekons, Parade and Raising Hell for me. Let's see, Fear and Whiskey got it last time, so License to Ill it is.

I'm casting a protest vote for Anita Baker because nothing on this list really excites me (as overall album). Raising Hell would probably be the better choice though. Have I ever heard all of Rapture?

Licensed, rather.

xp

"Sweet Love" rules. All the African-American female office workers were right, and I was wrong.

this is a cliche but if those first few anita baker singles don't summon a swoon, better check yr pulse. well not really each to his own but hearing her sing "caught up in the rapture of love" on a random radio while shopping still gives me major goosebumps.

overall half enduringly great & half waaay overated = typical P&J year?

Evol + The Queen Is Dead + Raisin Hell + Licensed To Ill = milestones

"Sweet Love" would definitely make my singles list; not so sure about its host album. At her worst Baker's the Bryan Ferry (mid eighties edition) of Quiet Storm. Rapture = Boys & Girls

Janet's the only one I still listen to though at the time I was a Smiths fan all the way.

The Queen Is Dead gets it. It's The Smiths' masterpiece. After that comes Motorhead: Orgasmatron, their masterpiece.

I still don't get Strong Persuader. Any album with a song as bland as "Nothin' But A Woman" (or whatever it's called) cannot be a masterpiece. Some of the lyrics are marvelous but Cray sings as if he's getting through demos. Hey, maybe that's the ticket - someone ELSE should record them. And who has? Bettye Lavette? Maybe someone in country should try 'em. Someone kinda slimey. Dwight Yoakam?

Much better year for albums than singles. I like a lot of the above though I've heard only the first three EPs (Tommy Keene again???). And who in gay hell voted for The Boredeans?!?!

One album I love a lot from this year that no one on ILM prolly cares about: Bronski Beat: Truthdare Doubledare (London), esp. the AIDS paranoid "Dr. John."

I'd add the Pet Shop Boys' Please to the list – still their most underrated album. And New Order's Brotherhood.

The Cray album is great, but its big singles stand out too much for me to vote for it wholeheartedly. I love a lot of these records but The Indestructible Beat of Soweto takes it for me because a) this was so huge for so many people, and b) the music is so beautiful.

No GREEN, no credibility. One of the best debut albums ever, with the best mid-song count-off ("Better Way").

http://www.myspace.com/groupgreen

Will anyone join me in wishing that the Stones' Dirty Work had made the final cut?

Besides Xgau? Alfred, OTM re: Anita Baker as Bryan Ferry.

I voted for King Of America. It has half a dozen of EC's best songs.

xp: Yup. And it's kind of strange that both Undercover and Steel Wheels made it to the top 30--in '83 and '89, respectively--but not Dirty Work, which is a far better (and harder rocking) record.

I like the two Elvis records too, especially King of America, but they're so uneven (especially KOA).

It would seem that critics at the time preferred Mick 'n' Keef when they wrote silly sex songs or "reconciled."

I've always felt it was a relatively slow year for music. Since Slayer and Metallica aren't listed, I chose The Feelies. Much as I love Motörhead, Orgasmatron was not a great album.

There were some nice modest almost-forgotten classics like The Woodentops' Giant, Screaming Blue Messiah's Gun Shy, Hunters & Collectors' Human Frailty, Scratch Acid, Shriekback, Bad Brains, The The, Talk Talk, Housemartins, etc.

Speaking of modest almost (or completely) forgotten classics (or non-classics):

probably not really the 125 best albums of 1986

I'll vote for the Beasties' best album ever (over the Pogues by some distance), I think.

I'll give it to Evol - slightly edging out the Pogues and Crowded House.

Missing: John Zorn The Big Gundown

Song X! I can't get enough of that shit, and "Mob Job" is a good song to play in a duo setting AND to sing to a baby, which is more than anything I can say for the Beasties. Who are nonetheless great. And yeah, where the heck is Slayer?

10. amor fati - body w/o organ

What's this like?

I just listened to Song X last week for the first time in eons and I still adore that record. I actually think it's better than any of his 1960s free. There's a sweetnees, even goofiness to it that I don't hear in the Free Jazz era (which is probably why babies dig it).

10. amor fati - body w/o organ
What's this like?

Not really sure anymore ("noisy but quiet"? "scary"? "intense"? "boring"?), but I'm pretty sure it could use more organ. (Amor Fati, who also recorded as Will To Live or some name like that, was this crazy loner living in the 'burbs of Jersey, if I remember right. His music was self-released, and I think Gerard Cosloy was also a fan. I heard some of his more recent music a couple years ago, and it seemed totally bleh, but maybe his '80s stuff - which I haven't heard in decades now -- was better, who knows? I mainly remember he had these meticilous, handmade album cover packages depicting torturous ancient medical procedures and the like.)

lots of great ones to choose from - imo Elvis' last great records; pogues, ornette, xtc, minutemen, paul simon, & jamc are all faves of mine by those artists. but for my earholes, indestructible beat of soweto still unbeatable

Just in terms of current day reputation/acclaim, I'm amazed that out of all the male solo artists, Peter Case placed in the Top 20, let alone finished higher than Billy Bragg, Richard Thompson, Robyn Hitchcock, Alex Chilton, and Julian Cope. The album's good, but not that good, is it?

Anyone who was around back in the day, were the Plimsouls so loved/missed that it made Peter's solo album more exciting in someway?

I'd have voted for the Ornette except the reissue is even better.

The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, no contest at all (says someone who loves Parade and Blood & Chocolate and Licensed to Ill etc.)

Xhuxk's list >>>>>> that depressing list above. (Far as I can tell, anyways, judging from the 40%-or-so that I'm familiar with.)

Yeah i agree, oddly enough, though I'm not brave enough to go back to the '85 list and determine whether innnocuous crap like the Bodeans and Peter Case and Crowded House and the Smithereens and Robyn Hitchcock and That Petrol Emotion (and has-been tedium by P&J fixtures Elvis Costello and Peter Gabriel and the Huskers and Heads et. al.) make the '86 list even duller. Boring EP list, too, though it's kinda fun to see Uzi and Das Damen on there....Honestly, though, looking at how bad the years' singles and albums lists are, it doesn't surprise me at all that I was hunting around at the time for music with more bite to it, even if most of the pretentious malarkey I was listening to at the time didn't wind up leaving a long-lasting impression.

(Add to has-been fixtures taking up space list: Bragg, Thompson, Brunett, Bruce, R.E.M....folkies, mainly, when you get down to it. A few of whom have made some halfway decent records since, but there was very little indication in 1986 that that was ever going to happen, believe me. And of course the biggest folkie won the poll, with an album not nearly as good as own '70s albums, but at least his '86 album had a distinctive idea behind it, and I assume people voted for the idea. And though I've never had any use for Parade or Throwing Muses, either, at least they don't give off the feeling of music just lazily spinning its wheels like most of this stuff does. '86 P&J LP I'm now most curious about, oddly enough: David & David. So sue me.)

If nothing else, it might be the most Starbucks P&J list ever (two decades early, no less!)

I don't agree that the R.E.M. record is "taking up space." Maybe it's because it was the first thing of theirs I heard way back in 7th grade, but Life's Rich Pageant was always an exciting listen to me. And it's the first big rock (as in arena) album they cut, a sign of departure, and you could fucking dance to it man, unlike their previous output.

Yeah. Not to turn this into the 3,000th thread R.E.M. thread (and call The Ghost of Tim Ellison), butLife's Rich Pageant is their best record between Murmur and Out of Time.

Since no one's cited it, I'll be the one to admit that So would prdobably make my top twenty. I don't get the disdain for "Sledgehammer" -- out of all the yuppified mid-eighties Stax pastiches, this is certainly the best, and the only one in whose creator's eye you can see a twinkle of good-natured fun. It's probably my favorite mainstream Daniel Lanois production too: he restrains most of Gabriel's worst quirks.

I'll third Dirty Work. And David + David's record is quite good -- its AORisms are pretty of-their-era, I suppose, but they're much more exciting than, for instance, So.

So was Huey Lewis's Sports (which had some Stax in it, for sure) (as did ZZ Top -- hell, they covered "I Thank You" on Deguello), for starters. (I've actually never detected any soul music in Gabriel's stuff -- which was way less clunky and more graceful on his first three albums, and in Genesis for that matter -- but I've been hearing people swear it's there for decades, so it must be. Then again, it's also in Michael Bolton.)

I'll cosign all of that.

(Not nominating Huey or ZZ for '86, when they weren't doing much worth hearing. Just saying yuppies had better faux-Stax to pick from.) (Hell, Mellencamp might have even qualified once or twice.)

innnocuous crap like...Crowded House

"Innocuous", maybe - in that they worshipped openly at the altar of the Fab Four - "crap", no. Memorable songwriting can redeem even the most familiar of popular music styles.

I've actually never detected any soul music in Gabriel's stuff --

Nah, only in "Sledgehammer."

which was way less clunky and more graceful on his first three albums I don't hear ANY soul music in those first four solo records. If you mean they're superior to So, then I agree.

and in Genesis for that matter

Phil Collins-era Genesis, right? I've always loved "Turn It On Again" and "No Reply At All," which use Earth, Wind, & Fire to good effect.

lifes rich pageant occupies that elusive middle ground between a more fully-realized approach (relative to fables, but not relative to, say, reckoning) and this sense of dread, like you knew they would never ever be this good again. after pageant was the slow, steady decline that hasn't stopped.

coincidentally (or not), it was also the first time the record company meddled: they specifically told stipe that he had to enunciate more. or some. folks at the label felt that his mumbling was the only thing keeping them off mainstream radio. that said, it was thrilling to hear "superman" on the local fm rock station with some regularity.

Which Stipe didn't sing.

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT CONTROL

wasn't psychocandy in '85 tho?

(voted KING OF AMERICA)

Psychocandy was early '86 in America.

Best yuppie faux-Stax actually = J. Geils, maybe.

And nah, Alfred, I didn't mean to imply Gabriel's earlier stuff had soul in it either (though "Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" flaunted some Drifters in its chorus I guess.) And yeah, there's obviously way more r&b in '80s Collins Genesis (not to mention Phil's all-time career high point "Easy Lover" featuring Philip Bailey), than in '70s Gabriel Genesis, which I like about equally anyway. And both Genesis choices have always way easier to take than So (as were, right, all of PG's earlier solo LPs.) So why did critics go all ga-ga for this one?

because it had the hit?

Well, that would explain its placement on the single list. Though "Games Without Frontiers" and especially "Shock The Monkey" (neither of which scored on Pazz & Jop) had received airplay (at least AOR airplay) previously, right? Not as much though. And besides, as I'll say again, the hit sucked, even (or especially) if he did think he was Otis Redding. (And anyway, the correct answer would be "because it had the video." An even dumber reason, but then I've always hated its stupid video too. I'm a grump.)

Er, wait -- actually "Shock The Monkey" did score, didn't it? (as did the third solo album.) So never mind that. I don't know why this still bugs me.

On another subject, is that Green On Red EP any good? (Were Green On Red ever any good? Now that I think of it, I don't think I ever heard them -- always assumed they'd be a second-rate Dream Syndicate or something. But I'm pretty sure one of their people is on the Danny and Dusty LP with some Long Ryders guy, and I'm pretty sure that's still on my shelf somewhere, so who knows?) (I don't have much of a Long Ryders opinon, either. Though I briefly owned an LP by them once, I think.)

Just checked... Danny & Dusty The Lost Weekend (A&M, 1985) has Dream Syndicate dude Steve Wynn plus Sid Griffin (the Long Ryders fellow, right?) guitaring behind Dan Stuart, who google says sang for Green on Red. I should put this LP on again sometime. I remember R.J. Smith loving it back then.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

OH GOD HELP US

Shit, my Anita Baker vote didn't take anyway. Thank you new ILX.

I sat this out, but for what it's worth, I still mentally play songs from the Robert Cray, Billy Bragg, Run-DMC, Prince, Smiths, Jesus+, and Pogues albums, to the point where they don't even feel like "80s" albums except the Smiths. I would defend Bragg's "The Passion" as pretty timeless, with guitar as lovely as The Indestructable Beat, but I know Bragg hatred is a natural and healthy thing.