the fall
The 50 Best Albums of 1982
Looking back at 1982 in music, the headline is obvious: Thriller Sells A Bajillion Copies, Becomes World’s Biggest Album. But is it the year’s best album? Funny enough, Michael Jackson‘s sixth LP hardly even affected the charts that year — it snuck out in late November, just as Men at Work’s 1981 blockbuster, Business as Usual, began its commercial stranglehold in the U.S. Only one record on our list, Fleetwood Mac‘s chart-targeted Tusk follow-up, Mirage, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. (Doesn’t it seem weird, looking back, that Prince‘s 1999 peaked at No. 9?) Lots of fascinating shit was happening in 1982, and you didn’t always find it on the radio. On our list, we included everything from early hip-hop (Grandmaster Flash) to horror-punk (Misfits) to lo-fi synth-pop (Solid Space). Revisit...
The Reissue Section: November 2020
This month’s edition of the Reissue Section bounces all around the globe: from Athens, Ga. to Wales, from Berlin to Sacramento (and back to Athens again). Seriously, this COVID year continues to yield some of the best archival titles since they first started telling us that CDs were a dead scene. As if… Pylon – Pylon Box (New West Records) / Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth (Domino) If we’ve learned anything from the recent barrage of TV show revivals, anniversary stories and video game nostalgia, we know the early 80s brought a major cultural sea change — especially on modern rock radio, as punk took on bolder forms against the backdrop of New Wave. Pylon (of Athens, Ga.) and Young Marble Giants (of Cardiff, Wales) were way ahead of their time at that pivotal p...
