1987 - redemption with chords

I’m going to say that six out of the 10 records on this list came from bands looking to prove (or redeem) themselves. Whether it be breaking ties with the style that made them famous (Jesus and Mary Chain, U2) or just demonstrating that they still had some good tunes left (George Harrison, Prince, X), 1987 was a year for rising above.’87 also had some “rage against the dying of the light” moments, courtesy of X’s farewell record See How We Are. On a personal level, while I may not have written Joshua Tree, I survived my first year of life, which is something to be proud of, I reckon.

10. George Harrison – Cloud Nine

I tend to favor records that aren’t too spit-shined. Lo-fi still sounds good and dirty years later. But what passed for a clean recording in the ’80s sounds like garbage 20 years later (I imagine the same will be said of today’s autotuned pop music). Such a fate befalls Cloud Nine, an overproduced record from my favorite Beatle that manages to transcend its bad recording thanks to Harrison’s effortless pop craftsmanship.

Harrison always seemed, to me at least, to have the best post-Beatles career. John Lennon wrote some incredible tunes as well, but in terms of high quantity with high quality, Harrison is tops. Cloud Nine, released after a five-year hiatus from writing and recording music, marked a return to form for Harrison. Spurred on by the monster lead single “Got My Mind Set on You” (and, to a lesser extent, follow-up “When We Was Fab”), Cloud Nine showed that Harrison was still a great talent. Of course, it didn’t hurt that his buddies Eric Clapton, Elton John, and Ringo Starr jammed with him. This in turn inspired him to form one of the few good supergroups, The Traveling Wilburys, with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne. While it’s production sometimes causes its bluesy twang to sound too akin to a bad country record, Cloud Nine is still a winning pop record from an old master.

9. The Jesus and Mary Chain – Darklands

Why was this record so controversial in 1987? It basically sounds like the “big production” version of JAMC’s stellar Psychocandy, which is to say I love this record too. The Reid brothers, bored with being known only for crafting dissonant pop, opted to drop the distortion and keep the somber tunefulness, resulting in a record that’s cool in spite of having stereotypical thudding ’80s drums. Seriously, did everyone use the same kit for an entire decade or something? Regardless, Darklands was a solid sophomore act from JAMC. It’s a shame things got so muddled afterwards.

8. U2 – Joshua Tree

Hate ‘em all you want, I guarantee you already know the words to at least half of the songs on this album. Indeed, Joshua Tree starts off sounding like a greatest hits package, knocking out (in order) “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “With or Without You,” and “Bullet the Blue Sky.” My gosh. Joshua Tree has a familiarity to me afforded only for The Beatles, and maybe Billy Joel. This album was inside me before I even bought it in high school. And while that association has kept me from ever truly loving Joshua Tree as much as people did in 1987, it hasn't kept completely away. I just prefer the joys of discovering songs like “The Refugee” and “Like a Song…” on my own.

But getting back to Joshua Tree’s content, it’s amazing how assured and triumphant the band sounds here compared to before. Gone are the herky jerky post-punk undertones of Boy and October. The heart-on-the-sleeve earnestness of War and The Unforgettable Fire has matured and The Edge’s love of chiming, ambient guitar work has reached its zenith here. Joshua Tree, and Rattle and Hum a year later, is a love letter to American roots music, and it’s apparent throughout. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is one of the most soulful gospel songs of the ’80s, made even more apparent on Rattle and Hum.

7. Big Black – Songs About Fucking

The title says it all. Big Black was a vicious entity, and those snarling guitars and analog layers never stop obliterating me. Songs About Fucking is where industrial should have gone. That is to say, I wish it was more like hardcore with a robot drummer. Frontman Steve Albini sneers and shouts his way through a mix of political assaults (“Colombian Neckties”) and pure hatred (sample lyric from “Bad Penny:” “I think I fucked your girlfriend once / Maybe twice / I don’t remember / And I fucked all your friends’ girlfriends / God I hate you”). One of the few angry hardcore records of the ’80s to not rely on homophobia and chest-beating…

6. Embrace - Embrace

…along with Embrace’s only record. Essentially the sequel to Minor Threat and prequel to Fugazi, Embrace was another hardcore outlet for Ian MacKaye. Dude got to preach more about avoiding booze (“It is a Kool-Aid substitute!”) and just generally tear shit up. The group occasionally shifted from its straight-ahead punk chugging for more psychedelic, post-hardcore leanings (“Dance of Days,” “Building”). MacKaye would more fully realize this style with Fugazi, but he started down that path a few months earlier in the short-lived Embrace.

5. Depeche Mode – Music for the Masses

Here’s where Depeche Mode found its happy medium. Less political/preachy than their mid-’80s material and less vacuous than their debut, Depeche Mode achieved a balance between pop and darkwave on Music for the Masses. A sexy record perpetuated by hits like “Never Let Me Down Again” and “Strangelove,” Music for the Masses was a important driving/dancing album for me in high school. Not that I ever became a good dancer. Depeche Mode just made me care more about feeling the beat.

4. X – See How We Are

It’s crazy how productive some bands were in the ’80s. The Cure and The Smiths shat out records annually with a pretty good batting average. Same goes for L.A. punkers X, who put out six albums in seven years, five of which are great. 1985’s Ain’t Love Grand!, however, is not great. It sucks. You know how artists put out divisive records, like Against Me!’s New Wave or Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks or like ¾ of Neil Young’s backcatalog, where people can’t agree if they’re genius or bullshit?

Ain’t Love Grand! is not that kind of an album. It is shitty; even the band straight up hates it. Of the six X re-releases, Ain't Love Grand! is the only one with liner notes that essentially tell you that you wasted your money. Tons of factors contributed, like touring burnout and artistic differences. The biggest reason why it sucked, though, was Master of Puppets sound engineer Michael Wagener. Wagener made a lot of bank handling metal albums in the ’80s, so when X came to him looking for a hit album, they got bad ’80s metal production. Frontwoman Exene Cervenka was virtually removed from the record thanks to Wagener’s borderline sexist attitude towards her lyrics and singing style. You know that “metal drums” sound that everybody used back in the day? That heavy yet artificial snare/bass sound that sounds like it was made on a keyboard? Yeah, that’s what Ain’t Love Grand! sounded like. Dokken and Poison suck, and so does Ain’t Love Grand!.

The one good thing about Ain’t Love Grand!, though, is that it was so terrible that it made the band’s swan song (before the numerous reunions anyway), See How We Are, sound even better. I bought my X albums chronologically, so I can say I felt the same emotions as X’s original fans in the ’80s did. I was relieved to hear a return to the rockabilly sound. Less punky than Los Angeles, the band’s evolution into a true American roots band was clear here. And while Ain’t Love Grand! was as badly written as it was recorded, See How We Are manages to be as lyrically captivating as it is sonically. John Doe and Cervenka are American poets with way more eloquence than the average punk and enough sense to keep it all tightly packaged. Still dealing with urban decay, romance, and political rambling, X’s last stand was a good one.

Of course, the band reunited in the ’90s to record hey Zeus!, which I still haven’t heard, and the original lineup tours to this day.

3. Prince – Sign O’ the Times

That last truly great Prince album, aside from the oasis that was 3121, Sign O’ the Times found the artist formerly and currently known as Prince aside from that lil spat with Warner Bros. during the ’90s (a.k.a. TAFACKAPAFTLSWWBDT9) without a band and threatened by the rise of hip-hop. Even in 2008, Prince still doesn’t get rap (Although “Alphabet St.” is pretty frickin’ awesome). So in a way, Sign O’ the Times is a “last hurrah” record.

Prince played like 95 percent of the instruments on the album, aside from some auxiliary percussion and a couple of guitar parts, making this double album all the more impressive. The title track establishes maturation in Prince’s lyrics right away, even though he still ended up writing a party record, with a series of vignettes about urban decay from HIV, drug abuse, and apathy.

Side three boasts my favorite section of the album, starting off with the Sheena Easton-assisted funk-metal single “U Got the Look.” A typical tune about gender politics, Easton brings some humor to the sexy number when she calls Prince out for reusing the “dream we all dream of / Boy versus girl in the World Series of Love” line. “If I Was Your Girlfriend” continues the gender discussion, only this time Prince philosophizes over intimacy, hetero/homosexuality, and the benefits of polygamy in its attempt to bed a single lover. This cool R&B song features sped-up vocals, giving Prince’s voice a more feminine sound, thus allowing the listener to take the song’s sexuality in two directions. “Strange Relationship” stalls the listener long enough for “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” to knock him and/or her out. An emotional ditty about Prince’s inability to fulfill a woman’s desires, the song’s hook rests entirely in its keyboard line. The guitar noodling during the bridge is nice, but it’s that rock out section that makes me wish the song never ended. I’ve love to see Prince jam out “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” sometime.

2. The Smiths – Louder Than Bombs

In order to be a Smiths fan, I think you need to hate Morrissey to a certain degree. Dude pilfered the sound his band created for his solo records. As a lyricist, he can sometimes be self-indulgent, and I don’t mean in the angsty way. The last Smiths album, Strangeways, Here We Come, marks the beginning of Morrissey’s growing lyrical inconsistencies, resulting in an uneven album that is at times frustrating in its goofiness yet thrilling in its exuberance. It’s by no means a bad album; think of it as my #11 pick for ’87. Besides, I think at least part of what makes Strangeways, Here We Come feel lame is that it follows not only The Queen is Dead, but the stunning U.S. collection Louder Than Bombs, which was released the same year as Strangeways.

The Smiths were a great British band, but it was us Yanks who made Louder Than Bombs. The band’s U.S. label, Sire, designed the record as a means of combining the The Smiths’ U.K. rarities compilations Hatful of Hollow and The World Won’t Listen, minus the singles that made it onto the U.S. versions of The Smiths and Meat is Murder. OK, enough history. Let’s talk music.

Louder Than Bombs is crammed with Smiths gems. Literally; it has 24 tracks totaling 80 minutes. You’ve got tender ballads like “Asleep” and “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” mixed with romper stompers like “Sweet and Tender Hooligan,” “London,” and “Panic.” There isn’t a bad track to be found, and this doesn’t even tap all of the singles The Smiths pushed out during their brief run. Some bands ooze brilliance. Hang the DJ!

1. The Cure – Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me

As much as I love “William, It Was Really Nothing” and “Panic,” there’s one angsty band I love more than The Smiths, and they are called The Cure. No band had a better studio run in the ’80s. Eight albums in 10 years – nine if you count Blue Sunshine by Robert Smith’s side project The Glove – and not a single dud among them. The Cure was a constantly shifting entity back then, and not just in terms of line-up. The band moved from post-punk to goth to goth/pop to psychedelic pop to whatever the hell Disintegration counts as. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me caught the band mid-shift, and the results are brilliant.

Returning to the drug-fueled expansion of Pornography and The Top without the bottomless despair of the former or the ridiculousness of the latter, Kiss Me offers a buffet of pop music. You get the dark Hendrix-style rockers of “The Kiss” and “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep,” the ragtimey “Catch,” and the frenetic singles “Hot Hot Hot!!!”, “Why Can’t I Be You,” and “Just Like Heaven,” arguably the greatest Cure song ever written.

“Just Like Heaven” is so good it made my girlfriend cry when we heard it live back in May. The way all the instruments converge in the intro, with the bass and china cymbals getting covered in more and more guitars and keys, the way Smith is so enamored during this beach visit with his future wife (Is there any description of romance more moving than the opening verse?), the way everything combines into three-and-a-half-minutes of ecstasy, leaves me floored every time. Morrissey knows how it feels to yearn, but Smith knows how it feels to love.

NEXT WEEK: The right notes aren’t always in tune, 1988.