“The Call stuck around for a good while, and always told the truth. But for me they’re forever 1983, saying what had to be said. Which is basically, hey America, remember those Romans who conquered the whole known world only to have their empire crumble under the weight of their corruption, hubris, decadence, stupid triumphalism? Looked in the mirror recently?” (Philip Random)
Reginald Dwight (aka Elton John) was beyond huge through the first half of the 1970s – ten studio albums (plus one soundtrack) between 1969 and 1975 and none of them awful. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was the last truly good one though, with the title track working a sort of country feel that shouldn’t have worked coming from an English suburban kid, but it did. The 70s were like that. Lots of fantasies realized … until the cocaine took over.
Two songs that more or less fuse into one from that oft forgotten era when the band known as Genesis weren’t just considered cool and relevant, they had the keys to the underground. In fact, they had a whole concept album about the place called The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway wherein a Puerto Rican street punk named Rael gets caught up in a local apocalypse (like a fly on a windshield) and next thing he knows, he’s trapped in dense labyrinthine depths that will take him the better part of four sides of vinyl to reconcile. In other words, it’s the early Genesis at the absolute peak of their ambitions (if not their attainments) and Peter Gabriel’s final album with the band. Though both would go off to achieve mega levels of success on their own, neither would ever again come close to the sheer weird edge cutting heights (depths?) they achieved here.
“The Alan Parsons Project were still pretty cool in 1977. In fact, if you were me, you were listening to a lot of I Robot (the album), digging the smooth and groovy and spacey hi-fi future it was suggesting. Apparently it was a concept derived from an Isaac Asimov book. I just dug it as a better than average stoner option, and it never got better than the title track.” (Philip Random)
“Husker Du‘s 1984 double album Zen Arcade was one of those documents that changes everything forever. Here was a punk-hardcore-whatever that was simply, enormously MORE. Here was a band that was going to do whatever the f*** it wanted as long as the sound was sharp enough to cause bleeding at fifty yards. What’s Going On Inside My Head was my mantra for a while – less a question than a howl of purposeful confusionism. Don’t bow to the chaos of the age. Eat it. Let it nourish you.” (Philip Random)
“Aerosmith from when they were still a properly dangerous rawk band with sleaze spilling out of their eyeballs and no talk of re-hab or MTV, the title track from Toys in the Attic being about as grunge-infested as any commercial rock band ever got … before Punk. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard it once while wandering through some suburban living room, drunk, a house-destroying partying going on all around me, shards of glass everywhere, amazed that somehow nobody had messed with the record player.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 