The story on the Zombies is that they’d broken up before their best stuff was ever even released. A classic case of being too far ahead of the curve as a track like Indication indicates, a pumped up ride with some killer keyboards at the heart of it all, and all months before the Beatles had gotten around to releasing Revolver. The upside being that we’ve never really grown tired of it.
“The Pixies were nothing if not fresh when I first heard them, which was pretty much as they hit. All the rage and bile of punk and hardcore applied to a smart, tight pop sense. But I’d be lying if I said I was entirely blown away. Because there was something a little too obvious about it. Like, why had it taken so long for somebody to put this formula together? Also, you had all manner of other stuff erupting at the time, all kinds of cool futures getting invented. It was only maybe five years later, (after they’d broken up) that I realized just how strong and good a band they were, with Doolittle the album they’d never top.” (Philip Random)
3 Teens Kill 4 only ever released one album, but it was a good one, very much in synch with the temper of the increasingly nasty times. In the case of Tell Me Something Good, that meant grabbing some audio from the TV coverage of John Hinkley‘s attempted 1981 assassination of Ronald Reagan, laying it over some mutated funk and turning it into a cover of that Rufus song. And nobody complained really. Homeland Security were not called. Nobody got stuck on a no-fly list. Welcome to the 1980s when such a thing as an art underground actually existed, a dark and mysterious place that was genuinely hard to get to, and once there, get out of.
Old England being the grimmest track found on the Waterboys‘ otherwise mostly uplifting 1985 masterpiece This is the Sea. Because what value empire when it’s children are giving up, choosing instead the kingdom inherent in refined opium? You can see it in their heroin eyes. The sun is most definitely setting. And just to make it clear he wasn’t messing around, main Waterboy Mike Scott would soon be relocating to Ireland with (again) almost entirely uplifting results.
Come the mid 1980s, Shriekback were doing two things very well. Dark and funky rave-ups that could seriously move a dancefloor, and dark and smooth little dreamscapes, that felt equal parts seductive and apocalyptic, rather like the world in general. Like looking your loved one in the eye and hearing a serpent hiss back. Creepy stuff.
“I discovered Barclay James Harvest during my mostly lame teenage years when I was doing everything I could to avoid punk rock (for mostly lame, late teenage reasons). This tendency led me down a lot of dubious roads, but as is always the case with music – there was gold to be found. In the case of Suicide? (found on 1976’s Octoberon), that would be not just the song itself (epic and sorrowful), but also the extended coda wherein binaural recording techniques are employed to give a visceral feel for what it’s like to hurl yourself off the edge of a building, achieve terminal velocity then SMACK … unto whatever happens (or doesn’t) next.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 
