“Guadalcanal Diary generally got compared to REM back in the day, because they were also from Georgia and their guitars had a tendency to jangle. But their songs always felt more direct to me, less concerned with being Art, more with melodies that tended to get stuck in your head for days afterward. Their first release, In The Shadow Of The Big Man, was jammed with such stuff.” (Philip Random)
As debut albums go, the Violent Femmes gave us one of the all time best – teen angst cranked to eleven, nothing held back. But their second album Hallowed Ground was probably even better; certainly bigger, darker, more dangerous. Yeah, they were still all horned up, but now there was also the very real problem of apocalypse, which in the mid 1980s was never further off than the edge of town. Or were those just rain clouds?
“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)
Before 1984’s Zoolook, Jean-Michel Jarre was known mainly for his proto new age synth doodlings (appropriate as they may have been if the drugs and mood were right). But give a man a sampler (in those days profoundly expensive and generally known as either a Fairlight or a Synclavier) and groovy things start to happen.
In which Mark Stewart (and his Maffia) lay down a dubbed out dirge of struggle and truth, reminding us that George Orwell’s 1984 was spot on if you happened to find yourself on the wrong side of the poverty line in the year in question. “Trying to pay the rent, the main worry’s job security. The busier you are, the less you see.” Same as it ever was.
You had to love the cover of Tupelo Chain Sex’s Spot the Difference. Little punk kid sporting a Ronald Reagan Adolph Hitler t-shirt, getting pulled two ways at once. But the real treasure was the music. Not just another hardcore band from LA, these guys had former Frank Zappa alumni Sugarcane Harris in their midst (not to mention a guy named Stumuk blowing a monster sax) and thus were brilliantly all over the place. Reggae, dub, ska, jazz, rockabilly, hardcore – everything, with lead off track The Dream (an extrapolation on an old Cab Calloway hit) serving as a whip smart intro to what remains one of the great (mostly) forgotten albums of any era.
Randophonic 