New Order – Ceremony the perfect bridge between their previous incarnation as Joy Division and the future they had to carve out for themselves following the suicide of singer Ian Curtis… By the time New Order recorded it in March 1981, the song was polished and glistening, Sumner’s voice, guitars and drums meshing together in a way that suggested the Joy Division chemistry had survived but also changed. You can hear the group rediscovering their confidence after Curtis’s suicide. The key lyric – “Heaven knows, it’s got to be this time” – is the sound of optimism born through crisis: the band’s delicate crawl from the wreckage into an uncertain new future produces a New Order classic theguardian

The Chefs – 24 hours a song about romantic obsession, and the gulf between real life and fantasy: ‘I know if I catch you it might turn out/That it’s not as much fun as I’d hoped that it would be/ ‘Cause wishing and waiting it what it’s all about/ And dreams are worth ten times more than reality.’ McCallum described “24 Hours” as an ‘attempt to write a song that sounded like Donna Summer’, and said that it was a true story: ‘I fell in love with a fat scaffolder‘ wikipedia

Laurie Anderson – O Superman This song, if it is one – try humming it in the shower – led to Anderson’s first multi-song album, 1982’s Big Science…

I didn’t understand, back in 1981, that O Superman was about the mission to retrieve embattled Americans during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, in which 52 US diplomats were held by Iran for more than a year. Anderson herself has said that the song is directly related to Operation Eagle Claw, a military rescue operation that failed: a failure that included a helicopter crash. This catastrophe demonstrated that the American military-industrial Superman was not invincible, and that the automation and electronics mentioned in the song would not always win. The helicopter crash, said Anderson, was the initial inspiration for the song or performance piece. When O Superman became a hit, first in the UK and then elsewhere, Anderson claims to have been astonished. What were the chances? Very slim, you would have said ahead of time…

So, 1981. We had the radio on while cooking dinner, when an eerie sound came pulsating over the airwaves.

“What was that thing?” I said. It was not the sort of music, or even sound, that you ordinarily heard on the radio; or anywhere else, come to think of it. The closest to it was when, back in the days of record-players and vinyl, we teenagers used to play 45s on 33 speed because it sounded funny. A soprano could be reduced to a slow, zombie-like baritone growl, and often had been.

What I’d just heard, however, wasn’t funny. “This is your mother,” says a chirpy midwestern voice on an answering machine. “Are you coming home?” But it isn’t your mother. It’s “the hand, the hand that takes”. It’s a construct. It’s something out of a sci-fi movie, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers: it looks human but it’s not human, which is both creepy and sinister. Worse, it’s your only hope, Mom and Dad and God and justice and force having proved lacking…

Anderson’s large project in Big Science was a critical and anxious examination of the US, though not exactly from without. She was born in 1947, and was thus 10 in 1957, old enough to have witnessed the surge of new material objects that had flooded American homes in that decade, 15 in 1962 during a highly active period of the civil rights movement, and 20 in 1967, when campus unrest and anti-Vietnam war protests were in full swing. The upending of norms, for a person of that age, must have seemed normal.

…She was a refugee, not to America but from within America: a Mom and apple pie America, an America of the past that was being rapidly transformed by material inventions, and by the freeways, malls, and drive-in banks cited in the song Big Science as landmarks on the road to town. What might be bulldozed next? How much of the natural matrix would be left? Was America’s worship of technology about to obliterate America? And, more largely, in what consisted our humanity?

As the 20th century has morphed into the 21st, as the consequences of the destruction of the natural world have become devastatingly clear, as analogue has been superseded by digital, as the possibilities for surveillance have increased a hundredfold, and as the ruthless hive mind of the Borg has been approximated through online media, Anderson’s anxious and unsettling probings have taken on an aura of the prophetic. Do you want to be a human being any more? Are you one now? What even is that? Or should you just allow yourself to be held in the long electronic petrochemical arms of your false mother?

Big Science has never been more pertinent than it is right now. Have a listen. Confront the urgent questions. Feel the chill. MargaretAtwood

Soft Cell – Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go? a good, quirky New Wave cover of an obscure Northern Soul song that most people outside of Wigan Casino regulars were probably not familiar with. As a 2:38 pop song it’s always welcome to my ears as it follows my first rule of this dirty business called show: always leave them wanting more!

I can’t say the same for the interminable 12″ version that was a medley with the far more overplayed Supremes classic “Where Did Our Love Go!” The two songs are stretched out to a dissolute 8:57 that hearing once was tiresome enough. But over the years, this seems to have been made the go-to mix of the song! I’ve heard it in grocery stores, for crying out loud! It is one of the tracks that would always make me leave the club floor; a DJ disaster!.. It’s gotten to the point where whenever I hear the distinctive intro to this song, I enter a state of anxiety until I can ascertain that I will be subjected to the relief of the 7″ mix instead of the dreaded medley 12 inch! postpunkmonk

Grace Jones – Pull Up To The Bumper Is there a sexier album than Nightclubbing? Forty years later, Grace Jones’ insatiable dance classic is still turning everybody on with its pitch-perfect balance of style and substance. With help from Sly and Robbie’s rock-solid rhythm section, Jones tested the limits of pop music by smashing genres together — moving confidently from disco to dub then new wave and post-punk, often in the same track. She completely reinvented material written by Bill Withers, Sting, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithful and Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla… And what about that Armani suit? I mean, c’mon. She even made shoulder pads cool spin

The Police – Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic The astonishing thing about ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic‘ is that almost half the song is made up entirely of ad-libbing – or at least appears to be…

It’s a simple story of a man who is too afraid to tell a girl of his affection for her, but despite the insanely catchy chorus, the part where the song really achieves its greatest slam-dunk is in the deceptively intricate verses. That classical-cum-jazz-cum-prog intro doesn’t initially give you any inkling of the monster refrain to come just a few seconds later, and seamlessly chimes with the theme of unrequited love that permeates Sting’s somewhat tragic lyrics, which sound relatively innocent on the surface but are actually filled with longing and woe: “Every time that I come near her, I just lose my nerve as I’ve done from the start“, “It’s a big enough umbrella, but it’s always me that ends up getting wet,” and “But my silent fears have gripped me long before I reach the phone. Long before my tongue has tripped me…must I always be alone?”

It’s one of those songs that seems to be impossible to tire of, a remarkable tune that could brighten up the dullest party and make even the Grinch rethink his life’s priorities. Just a brilliant record that’s well and truly stood the test of time. godisinthetvzine

Television Personalities – Look Back In Anger a feat of three-piece economy, chockablock with relentless hooks and poignant lyrics. In just 37 minutes, the record paved the way from post-punk to indie rock, hauling passé sounds from the ’60s into uncharted, lo-fi terrain. Their sound, cleverness, fragility, and frankness snowballed through music, rolling into the work of Morrissey, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, Nirvana, and Pavement. Alan McGee claimed Television Personalities changed his life, leading him to start his groundbreaking label Creation Records. Other bands even began to dress like Television Personalities; a whole rock movement named itself after paisley patterns

…And Don’t the Kids Just Love It is shot through with the simultaneous joys of discovery and simplicity, unmistakable evidence of the kid genius behind it. Almost every track is a clinic in verse-chorus-verse tension…

Beneath it all, desperation and rage are palpable. The Clash famously sang about using fury. Television Personalities, on the other hand, mostly just wanted to depict it… The LP shifts from the claustrophobia of unhappy families to the despair of living among equally miserable friends. Adulthood’s beginning is carved into the record’s grooves like graffiti on a bar top—Treacy completed …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It when he was 20, an age when home is untenable, but all the friends you might move in with are still shaky themselves… On the final track, “Look Back in Anger,” the turbulent family narrative from the disc’s beginning passes down to the next generation. Our hero looks back at a failed relationship with exasperation and regret: This cycle of disappointment, Treacy suggests, keeps rolling on in its quintessentially English way. pitchfork

The Church – Bel-Air Johnny Marr asked Mike Joyce to be in the Smiths after attending a gig by Anglo-Australian alt-rockers the Church. Would the modern musical landscape be any different if this event hadn’t happened? There’s a nice dinner-party discussion right there…

the electric guitar is at the heart of every song, yet it never resorts to the overblown, rock-god histrionics that punk tried, but failed, to eradicate. In the era when everyone was buying one of those new and affordable synthesizers that appeared in music shops around the world, a few bands clung to their guitars…

Bound by a love of jangle, paisley, and mind-altering substances, the band was signed to EMI after a four-track demo recorded in Kilbey’s bedroom caught the attention of a publishing company… a curious record. It plays lip service to the prevailing winds of new wave but still manages to contain the ringing Rickenbacker jangle of 1966… it’s obvious that the band were not so gently nudged/shoved into making a record that sounded like the kind of thing the Cars would have recorded if they’d have been born a few thousand miles to the right of the map and fallen out with their keyboard player popmatters

The dB’s – Black And White Two years before R.E.M. released Murmur and three years after Big Star’s Third/Sister Lover, Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey continued the tradition of Southern jangly guitar rocks. Stamey had played bass with Alex Chilton, but produced something equally Byrds-influenced with lovely harmonies, tight rhythm and punchy power-pop hooks pastemagazine

R.E.M. – Radio Free Europe it’s all post-punk lightspeed jangle, I’m not get all hipster on you and claim that I prefer it to the Murmur version, which is both (slightly) slower and (definitely) weirder medialoper

Recorded in Mitch Easter’s parents’ converted garage in April 1981, the song was part of early demo cassette that was copied and distributed to clubs, journalists and labels. It came to the attention of Jonny Hibbert, who owned the Atlanta-based indie label, Hib-Tone. He put ‘Radio Free Europe’ out as the band’s first single backed with ‘Sitting Still’ superdeluxeedition

The Go-Go’s – Our Lips Are Sealed the sex-crazed, drug and booze-addled punks who turned into fresh-faced mom-and-apple-pie girls from next door and in a career that lasted just half a decade in the late 1970s and early 1980s made history as the first all-female band that wrote their own songs and played their own instruments (though not very well at first) to top the US Billboard album charts

it was Wiedlin’s brief L.A. affair with Terry Hall of The Specials, which was their … seminal stroke of luck. They kept in touch for a short while after he returned to England and in one letter Hall sent Wiedlin some lyrics that were prompted by their relationship and which she turned into a song. That song was ‘Our Lips are Sealed.’ godisinthetvzine

The Raincoats – Shouting Out Loud Odyshape lives and breathes disorientation, requiring you to sit up straighter and squint at what’s being actively shaped by these shambolic frequencies spin It’s a very intimate recording, full of sounds they wisely never tried to recreate again, and vocal takes that are often inflected with a heart-crushing vulnerability… Despite living in an era where almost all music is available on tap, Odyshape still feels like a self-contained secret floating out there waiting to be uncovered pitchfork

Vivien Goldman – Launderette one of the key voices in the late ’70s UK press to acknowledge the profound influence of Jamaican music on England’s emerging punk and post-punk scenes, and after being inspired by her female friends like the Slits who were starting bands without having much (or any) prior musical experience, she recorded a one-off single in 1981 (thanks to studio time borrowed from fellow dub enthusiasts Public Image Limited) that became a certified punky reggae classic… On “Launderette,” Goldman recounts a soured laundry room romance in a lilting voice over wandering, slow-throb dub bass (by George Oban of the reggae group Aswad) that provides the song’s primary foundation, filled in by rattling percussion, some distant violin warble courtesy of Vicky Aspinall of the Raincoats, and sparse, scratchy guitar from PiL’s Keith Levene maximumrocknroll

Au Pairs – It’s Obvious debut album, Playing With a Different Sex…. stopped me in my tracks. The title was suggestive, but the message was anything but sexy once you’d digested the scalding sarcasm of its lyrics, dripping with contempt for the cliches of contemporary sexual politics. You’d think it would be quite hard to shock anyone, five years after punk, but I found these songs shockingly avant garde – and confusing.

It’s Obvious is one of the longest songs on the album, a centrepiece that stands for all. With its insistent drum beat, foregrounded bass line and jangling, rhythmic guitar riff, it has obvious kinship with Joy Division and Gang of Four, but more stripped-back and staccato. Lesley Woods’ ringing enunciation, with its mocking tortured twists, transfixed me: I had to play this song again and again, to the point of masochism…. To this day, I’m not even sure I like the music: it’s harsh, ugly, aggressive, but I still find it as compelling now as then theguardian

Tom Tom Club – Genius Of Love Their impressive mix of early day rap, afrobeat and funk made for an innovative record, a new sound, something so fresh… ‘Genius Of Love’ and ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ remain to date two of the most incredible pop songs ever made; instantly recognisable, Tom Tom Club truly succeeded in crafting a sound identity diymag

Blondie – Rapture Quibble about the quality of Harry’s rapping if you want, but the disco groove beneath the whole thing is magnificent theguardian

Stevie Nicks – Edge of Seventeen takes all of the spacey, trancey aspects of her music and rolls them into a single ball of hooky weirdness…. friendship with Tom Petty, that’s kinda sorta the springboard for “Edge of Seventeen,” as Nicks had befriended Petty’s then wife, Jane, and at some point Jane told Stevie that she and Tom met at the “the age of seventeen,” which Nicks heard as “the edge of seventeen,” and there we go medialoper

Bob Dylan – Every Grain Of Sand Equal parts Blakean mysticism and biblical resonance, the song abandons the self-righteousness that plagued Dylan’s religious work to offer a desperate prayer for salvation. Shadowing Dylan on vocals is gospel great (and Dylan flame) Clydie King: “I get chills when I hear her just breathe,” Dylan said. “Every Grain of Sand” taps into a moving humility (“Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me,” he sings). As Bono puts it, “Dylan stops wailing against the world, turns on himself and is brought to his knees.” rollingstone

Aztec Camera – We Could Send Letters like a naked defense of everything fun and pure about pop music, couched in a delightful complexity pitchfork

Josef K – Chance Meeting All mystery, windy hilltops, and intangible emotion, Chance Meeting featured a brass section that sounded like it had been recorded in a matchbox and strings that came in just on the fade for an extra dash of magic theguardian

The Fire Engines – Candyskin 1981 started on a high note for Fire Engines; the first NME of the year carried a double page spread by Paul Morley barely containing his excitement. Possibly one of the best Morley pieces ever, perfectly capturing the adrenaline and excitement of a band on the verge of something more important and influential, than even they could know.

On 3rd January, 1981 Paul Morley wrote “Onstage, they show off and show most other groups up. They go for 20 minutes ”’ don’t blink ”’ and do more, cause more sensations, than rock groups do in two hours. Their communication, for now is, impetuous and insatiable, and they refuse to over-estimate how far they can run before they lose their breath” louderthanwar

Pigbag – Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag On paper, a group creating wigged-out instrumental post punk records seems like a deeply unlikely commercial proposition… took shrieking and jarring slip roads away from the motorway of the track’s central riff before rejoining it indienumber1s

Liquid Liquid – Cavern it is tempting to view them as lost scriptures, examples of a magical, lesser-known way to render rhythm. If you lean on them, though, that’s not how it works. Liquid Liquid was deft and basic, as good as untutored music gets. Any wise choice was qualified to replace any learned move. Liquid Liquid songs foreground beat, but at least half of them are a step too soft for the dancefloor

“Cavern” is rooted to McGuire toggling between the notes A and C on his bass, playing the kind of hitched, self-fading line that no trained player would ever be able to write. It is as much the sound of being unable to play as it is some kind of clever phrasing. It is beyond clever when paired with the drumming, percussion, and vocals. “Cavern” is always there, already rotating and coming at you from behind the sun and under the earth.

“Cavern” found its way onto late night FM radio… It was another effortless and inexplicable New York groove, but no obvious smash until Sugar Hill Records got their hands on it. The Sugar Hill house band replayed the song, and Melle Mel rapped about the dangers of cocaine over it

come for “Cavern,” a wonder of nested movements and elastic power. Stay for the most understated dance music downtown ever produced. Or the most overstated stencils. Something. Maybe a phenomenon pitchfork

Kim Carnes – Bette Davis Eyes a cover… Jackie DeShannon released the original version in 1974… DeShannon’s version of the song, a sort of big-band boogie-woogie blues thing, was not a hit… state-of-the-art ’80s synth-rock. You can’t tell what’s electronic and what’s not. The keyboards and guitars sound just like each other. The handclaps are perfectly-placed drum-machine hits. The whole thing has a nervously insistent pulse to it, but it’s also got the dramatic sweep of so many ’80s-movie prom ballads. “Bette Davis Eyes,” as recorded by Carnes, has that sterile and hermetically sealed studio gloss all over it, and that sheen works as a great counterpoint to Carnes’ scraggle-growl vocals. In just about every other situation, the rawness of that voice would work against the extremely cooked backdrop. But on “Bette Davis Eyes,” Carnes and those gleaming bleeps find the same wistful tone, and they make perfect sense together stereogum

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers – The Waiting Most people dislike having to wait for things, so it’s fitting that Petty wrote a song about it popmatters

REO Speedwagon – Keep On Loving You They weaponized the power ballad, fusing soft rock and hard rock into one unstoppable whole… Kevin Cronin wrote “Keep On Lovin’ You” after he found out that his wife had been cheating on him before they’d been married. On the song, Cronin sings about getting past that and staying together anyway. (They got divorced a few years after the song hit big.) Cronin wrote the song on piano, and when he brought it to the rest of the band, they didn’t want to record it. It was too soft. It wasn’t rock enough. Cronin has said that he thought guitarist Gary Richrath was trying to drown him out when he played over it. But the big, crashing guitar chords lent weight and force to a soft and sensitive lament of a song stereogum

Mission of Burma – That’s When I Reach For My Revolver hangs on the precipice between slogan and introspection. Lines about heroes, dreams, and “the spirit fight[ing] to find its way” make it sound like a battle hymn, especially during its all-for-one-and-one-for-all chorus. But there’s also an undercurrent of bleakness running through the song, which ends with a resigned portrait of an “empty sky” whose “dead eyes…tell me we’re nothing but slaves pitchfork

The Cure – Primary The adolescent angst begins to curdle. The first track recorded for Faith and the album’s sole single nails that period Cure’s preoccupation with loss of innocence and search for some emotional substitute for Smith and Tolhurst’s childhood Catholicism (both encounter grief for the first time during the album’s protracted recording). The song has sleeping children dressed in white, a worrying suicide fixation and no guitars (Smith plays six-string bass) mojo4music

The Associates – Kitchen Person a rolling thundercloud of gloom and exultation within which the flamboyant, charismatic MacKenzie appears to be examining shyness, while Rankine assembles a soundtrack soaked in exotic menace; the manic mood, in this pre-sampling era, was created by playing at half-speed and then running the tape at full-tilt uncut

Scritti Politti – The Sweetest Girl 1980 it had been a fascinating but bleak year… There had to be a way forward. Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside had retired from the post-punk wars in 1980 after being hospitalised by a nervous breakdown. While he was recuperating, he began to listen to daytime pop radio. The Solar label ( Sound of Los Angeles Records) was on a roll in 1981. Shalamar’s Make That Move became one of the year’s biggest club hits, while the Whispers’ It’s a Love Thing was such an invigorating, Pepsi-bubbled single that it single-handedly helped Gartside out of his funk. He emerged from his Welsh mountain hideout at the end of the year with a new, barely recognisable Scritti Politti sound. The “Sweetest Girl” was a way out of the grey, post-punk conundrum. Don’t be scared of pop, it said, with its floating, electro-dub backdrop and Green’s high, sweet voice, which would soon become a regular Top 40 presence. The lyric was all about pop music and politics. The New Pop that Paul Morley would christen in a 1982 NME column started here.

The Whispers – It’s A Love Thing

The Human League – Love Action (Believe In Love) miffed at their lack of success so far… Love Action was where it all went gloriously right, reaching No 3 in summer 1981. Kept off the top by the combined Seaside Special jollity of Shakin’ Stevens and Hooked on Classics, Love Action shone out like a beacon of sanity and joy across the summer of 1981 theguardian

The Alan Parsons Project – Games People Play Turn of a Friendly Card focuses on gambling as an escape from the doldrums of middle age. The concept was sparked when Woolfson was sitting in a casino in Monte Carlo and observed the activities and sounds going on around him classicrockreview  the song may sound almost normal in places, but slips into very electronic breaks subjectivesounds

Smokey Robinson – Being With You presents a narrator who has decided to ignore the acquaintances of his who want him to think twice about his new romance. Warning signs that have cropped up before about this woman (They tell me all about your heart-break reputation) don’t phase him in the least (I don’t care what they think, if you’re leaving / I’m gonna beg you to stay).

He’s an optimist, focusing on what he believes are the positive changes she has made. But he’s not completely free of worry and doubt: Or can it be, that like love I am blind? / Do I want it so much ’til it’s all in my mind? The bottom line is that he’s all in, even if it means he isolates himself: I don’t care if they start to avoid me.

We never find out by the end of the song if it was he or his friends who were right about her. Based on the serenity of Robinson’s vocals, we can definitely tell that this guy is at blissful peace with his decision americansongwriter

Felt – Something Sends Me To Sleep Rough and rudimentary, with Lawrence mumbling “I told you so” beneath the stumbling guitars and boxy rhythm section, it’s as though from the very start they can’t be bothered with any of the niceties of presentation, that you need to accommodate yourself to them rather than vice-versa thequietus

Girls At Our Best! – Go For Gold a heavenly collection of three-minute classic pop songs with wonderfully subtle yet intelligent lyrics… never has an album given me so many tunes to whistle at a bus-stop the face

Marine Girls – Honey Despite their simple, very English sounds Kurt Cobain was a fan, including their debut album Beach Party in his top 50 albums. Listening to the heartfelt vocals and often raw lyrics you can see why the troubled King of Grunge identified with a Hertfordshire trio of students that seemed a world away for his sound louderthanwar

Yoko Ono – Walking On Thin Ice With clangorous guitar from Lennon over a murky low-end groove, “Walking on Thin Ice” frames Ono’s ominous narrative about life’s uncertainties, punctuated with shrieks. Beyond the new-wavers of the time and the alternative-era iconoclasts who would follow, the influence of Ono—and this song in particular—resonates…

“The family who laughs together stays together,” Ono writes in the liner notes for the 7” single, issued two months after her husband’s death, recounting a personal anecdote about their lives together. Despite a reputation for highbrow seriousness, perhaps one of her most foresighted ideas was one that rock’s misguided anti-Yoko axis had long since forgotten: Great art can make young people dance pitchfork

Yellow Magic Orchestra – Cue As a Japanese initialism, “BGM” stands for “background music.” It’s meant to evoke the blissful ’80s ambient work of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono, the kind of idyllic music that wafts from hip mass-market clothing stores or loops quietly under television dialogue. So it was with more than a hint of irony that YMO repurposed this term for their flashy, futuristic fourth album. BGM hones in on the “techno” aspect of the groundbreaking trio’s “techno-pop,” channeling each member’s unique personality into a monument of electronic music history, all captured with state-of-the-art recording gear. Four decades on, the album is a foundation for all manner of “synthetic” music that would follow, from synth-pop and IDM to hip-hop and well beyond…

By the end of 1980, with three albums under their belts, YMO were indisputably the most successful pop band in Japan—big enough to tour the world and then come home to pack out the Budokan. But when Hosono spoke to the Los Angeles Times that year, he portended a shift to come: “We don’t see ourselves as a dance band. YMO was planned as an electronics band from the beginning because that was the sound we were all looking for…. Something out of the ordinary.”

These songs and their sounds are intrinsically tied to the machines used to craft them. Alongside Sakamoto’s debut, BGM was one of the first albums to feature the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The high price tag of the 808 upon its release in 1980 (almost $4,000 in 2021 dollars) made it prohibitively expensive for most, but not for YMO. The glories of its use in the hip-hop and dance music of decades to come—relentless mechanical hi-hats, claps crisp enough to cut through any mix—are on full display on Takahashi’s “Camouflage” and Sakamoto’s searing, mechanical cover of his own “1000 Knives.”…

Sakamoto is rightfully credited for much of YMO’s forward-thinking sound design, but Hosono and Takahashi give the band its earnest heart… In terms of legacy, it’s perhaps the most important album they ever made as a unit. Each member’s subsequent solo work, at one point or another, subsumed the influence of BGM’s palette. It’s there in Takahashi’s heartfelt synth-pop records, Hosono’s ambient work, Sakamoto’s later collaborations with David Sylvian—a splash of drum machine, an unnatural texture. It’s the thrill of a tranquil synthesizer made loud, then aggressive, and then serene again pitchfork

Akiko Yano – Harusaki Kobani By the age of 17 she had established herself as one of the country’s most promising studio musicians. Headhunted by a record label, Yano penned nine out of the 10 songs on her landmark 1976 debut album, Japanese Girl. Still sounding strikingly original today, its unique amalgam of indigenous folk and western styles…
The album made her an overnight star. Hot on the heels of its success she took up the production reigns on 1977’s follow-up Iroha Ni Konpeitou, a work whose whimsical cover – featuring an Issey Miyake jumpsuit-clad Yano man-handling a blow-up dolphin – perfectly captures the oddball brilliance of its funk-laced rock. A period of collaboration with Yellow Magic Orchestra – whose keyboard player Ryuichi Sakamoto she would later marry – followed…
Joined once more by YMO, her 1981 album Tadaima (I’m Home) is her masterpiece; a vivid fusion of electro-pop with post-punk, disco and jazz. Yano is at her most brilliantly offbeat; her jazz-like vocal flights of fancy and idiosyncratic lyrics complemented by a raft of brilliant pop harmonies and the futuristic buzz of Sakamato’s inspired synth experiment recordcollectormag

Kraftwerk – Pocket Calculator the title could easily be substituted with “iPhone” and still sound timely spin

The Fall – Leave The Capitol perhaps the catchiest and least abrasive song the band had yet recorded; I’m guessing Smith wanted less adventurous listeners to hear the song’s eternally relevant message about how much London sucks pastemagazine

The Lines – Nylon Pylon Despite nominally sound credentials– Miles Copeland’s mentorship, a 1980 Peel Session, personnel links to Alternative TV, shared bills with the Cure and Birthday Party– the Lines have thus far been shut out of comprehensive compilations issued by the likes of Soul Jazz Records and Rough Trade Shops, and earned nary a mention in Simon Reynolds’ exhaustive post-punk tome, Rip It Up and Start Again… “Nerve Pylon”, on which the Lines shed themselves of their lo-fi limitations and go for the Big Music, with a snowglobe-scenic atmosphere and ascendant chorus that, in an alternate reality, would be getting regular VH1 Classic heavy rotation pitchfork

Department S – Going Left Right The whole song began at maximum velocity and never flagged in speed until the song’s abrupt end just three minutes in with the last “left/right” of the chorus slamming into the sonic brick wall. Hearing this one was like riding a luge track. the sense of speed is unmatched postpunkmonk

The Higsons – I Don’t Want To Live With Monkeys teetered on the verge of major success… formed in 1980 at UEA, Norwich. An energetic, brassy, punk/funk band influenced by the New York ‘No Wave’ bands and often referred to as the ‘British Talking Heads’ thenewvinylvillain

Vicky “D” – This Boy Is Mine remains one of the strongest examples of the synth-laden, post-disco sound variously known as boogie and electrofunk. The track has been reissued and remixed plenty of times over the years juno