Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1985
by Scott Miller

"Everybody Wants To Rule the World" - Tears For Fears
1985—it was all over. As drum machines and DX7s blared, crooning emoters with mullets and rolled up suit jacket sleeves paraded victoriously past countless sorry little rock combos at palpable risk of obsolescence. If you find that much cultural upheaval invigorating, there's a lot to like about "Everybody Wants To Rule the World"—principally, the Olympian dream reality occupied by the chorus melody. It has a way with creating chordal moods extremely economically: there are typically only a couple of notes going at any one time, played on personality-free synthesizers, yet they conjure a solid feeling of idea sharing, despite the fact that I haven't the slightest clue what the lyrics are about. Take "I can't stand this indecision/Married with a lack of vision." If it were "I can't stand this decisiveness/Married with a lack of vision," I could get a fools-rush-in message. As it is, it's sort of: "Fools fear to tread where angels also fear to tread."

"Taste the Floor" - The Jesus and Mary Chain
There are some songs that didn't quite make all the sense they were ever going to make until the movie Tarnation. I'm not even talking just about songs in the movie—it defined an uncommonly clear and novel aesthetic, and some songs, like "Taste the Floor," are just born to be Tarnation songs: mostly introverted, outsider art, with weird production like the tremendous amount of distortion and reverb in the mix here. The J & M Chain were notorious for coming to town, playing for twenty minutes, then leaving. I call that good timing; you don't need 90 minutes of this to learn the lesson. I like the way that just when you think there can't be more treble fuzz in the world, that root-canal solo guitar comes in.

"Each and Every Lonely Heart" - The Three O'Clock
I wrote one song on this album, so I should really disqualify myself for overfamiliarity but let this testify that I considered them one of the lingering flames of hope in the eighties.

"Nemesis" - Shriekback
The warbling soprano backing vocals cement the Rocky Horror impression made by this memorable piece of goth-disco. The singer sounds a little like Riffraff, only with the comedy replaced by deadpan in-character philophising about a fiendish sounding cult of Nietzschean amorality. 1985 was probably the first year there started being no dancing of any kind in rock night clubs, and you would feel creepy dancing to this.

"Paint Work" - The Fall
"L.A." and and added-single "Cruiser's Creek" are the go-to tracks, but I prefer the devil-may-care sonics of "Paint Work." The Fall create decent music, over which Mark E. Smith sings, or, as often, rants and rambles like a subway drunk on the way home from crashing an ex-girlfriend's party. If you listen closely, there's a somewhat touching thread of biz reflection as he "recommence[s] [his] diary": "Sometimes they say, Mark, you're messing up the paintwork."

"Walk It Down" - Talking Heads
The very catchy West-African sounding chorus requires that you sit through the verse, whose cookie-cutter 80s funk typifies the later Talking Heads who would never drift far from the primarily one-chord, slice of life success of "Once In a Lifetime." But I always enjoy listening to it.

"Anything, Anything (I'll Give You)" - Dramarama
John Easdale's frenetic shaggy-dog story style rocker is as sturdy as eighties radio fixtures come. "I'll give you anything you like—hundred dollar bills" is still a strangely indelible line.

"Driver 8" - R.E.M.
Stipe was getting more literary and relaxed. The perfect poetic tone of Murmur had to have been something of a happy accident (e.g. the idiosyncratic sex and pronunciation of Laocoon), but on this minor-tinged country folk, details like, "The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged" are obviously conscious in their control of detail.

"White City Fighting" - Pete Townshend
This shimmering guitar waterfall was co-created with David Gilmour, whose abilities really go quite a bit beyond what can be inferred just from listening to the post-Waters Floyd albums. Pete loves to apply fairly delicate music to the subject of violence, making an impression that is an odd combination of condemnation and fascination. Good to hear producer Chris Thomas hanging in there with yet a different kind of good sounding record—delicate, but not that gutted eighties sound.

"Things Don't Change" - Zeitgeist
They—including singers John Croslin and Kim Longacre—were later the Reivers, who I haven't had occasion to check out—but this is an R.E.M.-junior classic: ringy, open-string guitar, a reflective moment of isolation. The little guitar descent in the middle of "things don't change, they never have" is a great dash of pepper.

"Sun God" - Squirrel Bait
Squirrel Bait were widely known for being amazingly sophisticated-sounding for a hardcore band of apparently quite young teens. Some of them went on to form Slint, and guitarist David Grubbs was half of the engagingly peculiar Gastr Del Sol. The immense rock of "Sun God" involves screaming something about feeling the sun on his back and maybe something having "a mind to take it away/TAKE IT AWAAAAY." Strangely real. Maybe some of the best-ever music dreamed up entirely by really young people.

"How Soon Is Now?" - The Smiths
Good eighties production—I don't say that much. "I am the son and heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar" is a long cultural way to have come for a backing track that would still be a good enough home for "Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley had a farm."

"Circle Square" - Other Bright Colors
These very nice guys were a Carrboro, North Carolina band I crossed paths with a couple of times when on the road in the South, and this B-side of their indie single knocked me out. The singer phrases like Stipe, and of course for people resisting big time production trappings, it was the era for doing that the R.E.M. way, but they had a knack for getting sixties harmonies and social-consciousness narrative right that R.E.M. wouldn't really get right until later.

"Games" - Husker Du
If memory serves, this was the first time I was completely sold on a Bob Mould Husker Du song (unless you count "Eight Miles High," which I more or less do). I wasn't as much of a Zen Arcade fan as most of my generation.

"Soundtrack" - Thin White Rope
I produced an earlier version of this album that I presume the acquiring larger label considered inadequate and had re-recorded, so this is really another overfamiliarity disqualifier. But you get too picky in the mid-eighties and you're down to Madonna songs (see 1986).

"Forever Through the Sun" - LMNOP
This was possibly the single best production of the eighties that used stock eighties tools: big snare and keyboard. Even DX7 bell sound! But, man—fat mix. It's not just a glacial big snare, it's a throaty fighter-plane roar, and those synths honk and buzz at you with utterly unapologetic midrange. Fast, somewhat complex and harmony-heavy, it's lyrically the kind of absurdist sneer appropriate to the creator of Baby Sue comics, with nutso payoff moments like when a "nurse is going crazy/Like nurses always do/Is she healing you?"

"Insect Mother" - Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians
Fegmania was a minor letdown after the quality spike of I Often Dream Of Trains—why are there so many mediocre Robyn Hitchcock cuts when he is clearly so good?—but this one at least is a little miracle. It's the usual baloney about love like insect activity, but he leverages harmonies and odd meter in ways that are uncommon for him, and the miracle is how those synths which are apparently unintentionally out of tune come across as a plus.

"Swimming Ground" - The Meat Puppets
One of the best sounding records of the decade—achieved by complete avoidance of any eighties technique—was Up On the Sun. The unsingerly, almost mumbly vocals seem to just add to the visionary trippiness. The secret weapon is the bass playing—that fairly plain guitar hammer-on sounds orchestral given the bass's colorful support.

"On My Own" - "Les Miserables" Original London Cast
Frances Ruffelle was one of least vicious butcherers of this absolutely lovely tune. Every instrumental track on this crass recording does its best to sound synthetic and horrible, yet the whole achieves the effect of having sneaked the emotion across in budget-cutting circumstances—as if to say: we couldn't afford an acoustic guitar, we had to use this cheap ghastly keyboard sample of one. Sure. I'm guessing it will take any serious music listener at least 30 seconds to get over the sound, but from then on, it's a florid but masterful deployment of a show tune that is of unquestionable merit—something long overdue.

"Trail Of Tears" - Guadalcanal Diary
What 1985 wanted most was opposition, and a full-on, solid gold Western folk ballad was just the ticket. It's not the Native American trail of tears, it's some story of women waiting for returning soldiers. Whatever; what chokes me up is the digital delay on that snare, brilliant in its caveman refusal of fake grandeur. Oh, and Murray Attaway's fantastic vocals should be mentioned. But wow; the digital delay on the snare. That is what love is.