1982

Here's a good year.  That's the thing about the 80s you will find, some years are really the absolute greatest in history, others are kinda empty, others are really hard to fill with 10 classics but haf of those will be all-time masterpieces.  Here is the third  year of that decade  and it's not really any of those.  Just pretty damn good.  Unfortunately I was  unable to locate some of these and I apologize for  being less thorough, if you can pick them out...

10.  XTC - English Settlement
One of the Swindon group's best and the last before they became a studio-only combination.  Still with drummer Terry Chambers there is still a strong unified cohesion not dependent on production.  Still, studio perfection is a crucial part of this sprawling double album as first track "Runaways" establishes with its lush sound.  Though still a new wave band the punk energy of their early work is declining to make way in the band's interest in psychedelic pop that would come to take over.  With that the songs get longer and take on lyrics with bolder and more thought-provoking themes than heard on earlier material.  Even the explicit "Melt the Guns" transcends corniness in its message with a lot more finesse and taste than "Dear God."  With that, they still include "Senses Working Overtime" one  of their catchiest singalongs of all.  Most versions are on a single disc making it more concise, but it's all great and one of the most enduring "new wave" albums made.

9.  Mission of Burma - Vs.
The Boston band makes its one full-length of its initial career with this complex masterpiece that stands as one of America's best post-punk albums.  They have all the rage and fury of the explosion, but do it with a flagrant intellectualism befitting of their home town.  The trio plus tape manipulator are at their most unified with the four creating a dense sound with plenty of rhythm and noise to further distinguish these well-composed songs.  As usual the musicianship is some of the finest amongst their peers particularly in drummer Peter Prescott's wild, yet calculated driving thunder.  With his tinnitis worsening Roger Miller does not hold back on what he thought would be his final statement, but bassist Clint Conley's songs are no weaker, particularly on one of the album's best tracks "Dead Pool."

8.  The Birthday Party - Junkyard
The Big Daddy Roth album cover implies what Nick Cave announces on "Dead Joe":  "welcome to the car smash."  In other words, this is the sound  of five violent psycho junkies from down under.  Cave's vocals are of course in a category of their own and need no further elaboration.  He is growing and so is the rest of the band, all working together for the last time here bassist Tracy Pew absent at times due, naturally, to incarceration.  He, and Barry Adamson in his place, create the pummeling rhythms that make this album such a beat-down with drummer Phil Calvert, perhaps what is missing most from Cave's later work.  What is also with Cave for the last time is the ear-piercing guitar of Rowland S. Howard, a voice as horrifying and essential to this nightmarish record as Cave's vocals.  It is all held together by consistent Cave sideman and one of the finest multi-instrumentalists of the last 35 years, Mr. Mick Harvey.  This is not "goth," it is far too brutal for that.

7.  Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska
By now on top of the world and getting ready to go even higher, New Jersey's favorite son goes into seclusion with his darkest album of all.  Recorded on his own on four track, the boss is stripped of all his colossal arrangements and blaring starring the likes of other over-the-top personalities as Max Weinberg, Little Steven, and Clarence Clemens.  Quiet as it is this music is even more intense with all the gritty truth of America's underbelly coming to the forefront without much of the hopefulness of "Thunder Road."  It's bleak cover exposes the dark side of the heartland, but his home state is not safe either with the depressing "Atlantic City," capturing the desperation of the state's resort communities almost 30 years before the rest of the country's morbid fascination with the place.  I describe this album as "Suicide gone acoustic," and if you don't think so you should probably listen to this one again - particularly to "State Trooper," a frontrunner for his  "most Jersey" song.

6.  Kate Bush - The Dreaming
Bush really starts getting weird here, proving herself more than just a talented young girl with an unusual voice.  With "Sat In Your Lap" she introduces the heavy drumming that would define the sound of her next album as well as the more explicit madness that would provide her music with endless drama.  Her influences are mostly non-musical and very dark and surreal, allowing her own mind to reinterpret them into this dizzying array of sound.  The fretless bass is one of her best companions here with its ability to bounce across octaves perhaps the only thing that can keep up with her voice which flows most seamlessly on "Suspended in Gaffa" and the Vietman-inspired "Pull Out the Pin."  Bush also begins to freely let her Celtic influence out on "Night of the Swallow" preparing for her for the full immersion into the halucinatory druid underworld on Hounds of Love.  The cover says it all - a dark and mysterious record that will free you, but from what?  And why?

5.  Flipper - Album - Generic Flipper
San Francisco sure did change a lot in fifteen years!  This post-hardcore (by the standards of the time) quartet outdoes the Cure in bleakness and while it has no shortage of humor, it has proven to be even more tragic considering the demise of singer/bassist Will Shatter only a few years later.  As soul-crushing as "Life Is Cheap" and "Shed No Tears," are Flipper still functions well as a fun party band best heard on their legendary album closer "Sex Bomb" with its dueling saxophones.  Flipper was and  still is sometimes considered the worst band of all time and it is a strong argument is you don't like raw energetic rock and roll.  Each song is dominated by a plodding overdriven bass and the vocals of Shatter or alternate bassist/singer/songwriter Bruce Loose.  The drumming is just short of tight, but unrelenting in its attack and decade-older Vietnam vet Ted Falconi's guitar seems to just feed back creating the same wall of noise on every song.  A fun an cynical guide to "The Way of the World" and an exercise in post-punk minimalism.

4.  Go-Go's - Beauty and the Beat
Totally ignored at the time, the highly-influential LA punk scene manifested itself in some very unpredictable ways in the 1980s.  One of those ways is Mötley Crüe, another is X, but the one with the most success and the closest ties to the Germs was the Go-Go's.  The group's oldest member and musical force Caroline Caffey dominates the songwriting on this perfectly-crafted set of songs too often dismissed as sunny pop.  Sunny it is not, despite "We Got the Beat," with "Our Town" being one of the most biting and accurate odes to the group's home town ever made.  The group's talent is off the charts, with four-part harmonies that outdo anyone else in this whole decade laregely thanks to Jane Wiedlin's airy high-end. The severely underrated rhythm section of drummer Gina Schock and bassist Cathy Valentine adds depth to the hypnosis brought on by the dense harmonies.  Unfortunately it would not last, but the Go-Go's debut surpasses even the finest work of their power pop brothers, lucky Peter Case managed to catch on and get his name in the credits.

3.  The Dream Syndicate - The Days of Wine and Roses
Los Angeles' "paisley underground" makes its first appearance on the list with its most respected contribution.  Taking their cues from the Velvets, this consciously modern group puts together a flawless set of noisy and droning rock.  Steve Wynn's vocals may be cool and understated on top of Kendra Smith and Dennis Suck's simple rhythms, but lead guitarist Karl Precoda cuts though the foundation like a chainsaw with his aggressive and heavily-distorted attack.  The songs speak for themselves though with the band following a carefully-planned map that drones in a most calculated and precise way.  "That's What You Always Say," one of their earliest songs and featuring Smith's finest playing is their most accessible track, but their dramas are the definitive work, such as on "Then She Remembers" and the concluding title track.  "Until Lately" has such a building nervous energy that begs Feelies comparisons, the boy with the perpetual nervousness grown up, perhaps.  Plus, no one else has written as song called "Halloween" quite like theirs.

2.  Bobb Trimble - Harvest of Dreams
With the help of some very talented adolescents in the Cripple Dog Band, Worcester's Bobb Trimble goes further  down the rabbit hole (he was seen wearing a top hat with rabbit ears at the time) on his second and final "official" release.  He gets more grandiose, and accurate in his self-description with "another lonely angel headed for the borderline," taking over "killed by the hand of an unknown rock starr."  The first side, like the second on his debut, is book-ended with near-identical tracks, opening with the recorder-led "Premonitions - the Fantasy" and including the silent "The World I Left Behind" to let the listener here the "reality" around them.  This is broken up with the telephone and video game samples of the gorgeous "Armour of the Shroud," the album's longest song and the one signaling the tragic and beautiful sound he would explore in his subsequent Christian phase.  The cover, one of the most powerful images ever recorded captures the feeling of this dense psychedelic record portraying a man as out of place in the real world as this music was in the landscape of the 80s.  The reissue includes some amazing bonus tracks too, especially "Galilean Boy," the greatest song ever written about Christ period.

1.  Trees - Sleep Convention
Armed with a full set of videos at the dawn of MTV, a major label deal, and the best synth-pop in history it is a true mystery why Trees did not become the biggest thing in America.  Perhaps Dane Conover is too much of a nerd.  If that were the case there would be no "She Blinded Me With Science."  Perhaps Americans didn't want native synth pop, but I tend to believe someone had it in for Kim Fowley, who discovered and backed the San Diego genius and put him in the studio with usual cohort Earle Mankey.  This is a distinctly American album and as dark as Gary Numan attempting to take comfort in the age of mass destruction.  Themes include war and terrorism, "Sock of the New," and of course "Delta Sleep."  There is lighter fare like "India," "Gotta Moon" and the break-up opener "Come Back," but the apocalyptic sounds are some of the best.  "Midnight in America" is a chilling tale of terror from the perspective of the ones planning it and closer "Red Car" is an honest and complete reflection on  the creation of the H-Bomb giving this album the whole weight of the cold war.  My favorite has always been the eerie beauty of the lushly-arranged "Wildwood" with it's hypnotic (real) drums and Byrds-like harmonies, but the whole thing is amazing warranting listen after listen.  This apocalyptic synth-pop done SoCal style.  If you were looking for a true lost masterpiece this is the one.