Tag: Erasure

Categories
Playlists

Playlist: 75 tunes from 1991

Here’s a good long Apple Music playlist that could get you through an afternoon of chores, painting, or cooking. Perhaps a road trip from Toronto to Montreal. Or keep you company on a flight from North America to Europe.

I’ve done a few playlists over the years on this blog but never any that focused on the music of a particular year in the past. I’ve chosen to start with 1991 because it was particularly pivotal year for me in terms of musical discovery. It was the year that I started to dip my toes into alternative rock, a brave new world for me, a wave of music that included a huge variety of styles, very little of which sounded like the music of my parents. So even though I wasn’t listening to all of these songs at the time, I’d say that the majority are old friends, intimate acquaintances.

There’s seventy-five great tracks, representative of how I saw 1991. It’s not a ‘best of’. I’ve already done the list of my top thirty favourite tracks on this blog here. Some of the songs in that list appear on this playlist but there’s plenty others here and some that are much deeper cuts. I know that there are those of you out there who might catch some obvious omissions. Some of these might have been because they were not to my tastes but there are others, like My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” or The Real People’s “Open up your mind (let me in)”, that were not available to be added due to music rights and Apple Music or whatever. Still, there’s so many other gems that show the wide range of music that was coming out in those years just before Grunge exploded and changed everything for alternative rock.

For those who don’t use Apple Music, here is the entire playlist, with links to YouTube videos for each song:

  1. Primal Scream “Loaded”
  2. Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff “Dizzy”
  3. Blur “Sing”
  4. Teenage Fanclub “Star Sign”
  5. Lowest of the Low “Subversives”
  6. Electronic “Getting Away With It”
  7. Throwing Muses “Not Too Soon”
  8. Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge”
  9. James “Sit Down”
  10. Chapterhouse “Mesmerise”
  11. R.E.M. “Belong”
  12. Spacemen 3 “I Love You”
  13. Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians “So You Think You’re In Love”
  14. EMF “Unbelievable”
  15. Crash Test Dummies “Androgynous”
  16. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go”
  17. Pixies “Alec Eiffel”
  18. Levellers “Liberty Song”
  19. Big Audio Dynamite II “The Globe”
  20. Spin Doctors “Two Princes”
  21. Depeche Mode “Death’s Door”
  22. Slowdive “Catch The Breeze”
  23. Rheostatics “Record Body Count”
  24. Siouxsie & The Banshees “Kiss Them For Me”
  25. Jesus Jones “Right Here, Right Now”
  26. Northside “My Rising Star”
  27. Primus “Tommy the Cat”
  28. Morrissey “Sing Your Life”
  29. Pearl Jam “Jeremy”
  30. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Grey Cell Green”
  31. Big Audio Dynamite II “Rush”
  32. Ministry “Jesus Built My Hotrod”
  33. Paris Angels “Perfume (Loved Up)”
  34. Barenaked Ladies “Lovers In A Dangerous Time”
  35. Saint Etienne “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”
  36. Primal Scream “Come Together”
  37. Teenage Fanclub “The Concept”
  38. Billy Bragg “Everywhere”
  39. The Farm “All Together Now”
  40. Crash Test Dummies “The Ghosts That Haunt Me”
  41. Inspiral Carpets “Caravan”
  42. Morrissey “Mute Witness”
  43. The Tragically Hip “Little Bones”
  44. R.E.M. “Me In Honey”
  45. Meat Puppets “Sam”
  46. The Wonder Stuff “Welcome To The Cheap Seats”
  47. U2 “One”
  48. The Charlatans “Over Rising”
  49. Erasure “Chorus”
  50. Lowest of the Low “Henry Needs a New Pair of Shoes”
  51. Violent Femmes “American Music”
  52. Spirit of the West “D For Democracy”
  53. Blur “She’s So High”
  54. Spirea X “Chlorine Dream”
  55. Chapterhouse “Pearl”
  56. The Grapes Of Wrath “You May Be Right”
  57. The Dylans “Godlike”
  58. Lenny Kravitz “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”
  59. Levellers “One Way”
  60. Revolver “Heaven Sent an Angel”
  61. Barenaked Ladies “If I Had $1,000,000”
  62. Swervedriver “Rave Down”
  63. Rheostatics “Aliens (Christmas 1988)”
  64. Billy Bragg “Accident Waiting To Happen”
  65. The Farm “Hearts & Minds”
  66. Spirit Of The West “Far Too Canadian”
  67. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Kill Your Television”
  68. Odds “Love Is The Subject”
  69. R.E.M. “Losing My Religion”
  70. Pixies “Head On”
  71. Northside “Take Five”
  72. U2 “Until the End of the World”
  73. Blur “There’s No Other Way”
  74. Lowest of the Low “Rosy and Grey”
  75. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

And here is the promised link to the Apple Music playlist. I hope you enjoy.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Erasure “The innocents”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: Erasure
Album Title: The innocents
Year released: 1988
Year reissued: 2016
Details: 30 years limited edition, 180 gram

The skinny: Back in 2016, iconic synth pop duo Erasure celebrated their 30th anniversary together and to celebrate, they reissued their first twelve albums on 180 gram heavyweight vinyl. I enjoyed a lot of their early work but for me, there was one album that I decided was a must for my collection. “The innocents” was Vince Clarke and Andy Bell’s fourth album together and was my introduction to their music. The album spent many hours in my walkman and in the cassette deck of my bedroom stereo. I know each of the ten tracks very well. Some of them sound a bit dated today but that didn’t stop me from ranking it at number nine when I counted down my favourite albums of 1988 last summer. This is some serious 80s throwback.

Standout track: “Chains of love”

Categories
Albums

Best albums of 1988: The honourable mentions (aka #10 through #6)

 

Happy Thursday! And welcome back to my Throwback Thursday (#tbt) best albums series.

I know it’s been a while since the last of these but there’s good reason. If you look back at my sentiments at the time of my last series, you’ll see that I had this crazy idea of whipping through six of these things this year to catch up. Well, halfway through writing for this particular list, I hit a wall. I found the mission way too onerous and ambitious…. So I decided to take a break, take my time writing these posts, and enjoy them again. I’ve decided instead to choose years at random to do throughout future years and maybe even do some theme-based best albums lists. First, though, I wanted to share this particular list with you because I pushed through to finish it and it is a good one with a lot of important albums.

Our destination here is 1988, which is unbelievably just over thirty years ago now. I can’t really say it feels like yesterday because at the time, I was spanning my first and second years of high school. The problems of acne, getting braces, and math homework seem like another world ago. I had yet to hit my growth spurt, hadn’t yet started shaving, and I still hadn’t yet dipped my toes in the theatrical arts, something that would radically change my high school experience from then on out.

This is the second time we are touching down in the 1980s The last time we did so, I mentioned in the introductory post that I was still finding my way in the music world. The pop charts were king. AM radio and music video shows and countdowns, and whatever they played at the high school dances at which I was holding up walls. So yeah, a lot of the albums on this list were not even close to being on my radar back when they were released. In some cases, I came upon them a few years later, some of them took longer to take hold, but all of them are now staples in my collection and revered for their place in my musical education.

Yes, the ten albums in this list are all classics and I am going to kick things off with the first five below. And if you don’t know the trick by now, I will be featuring the top five, an album each Thursday, over the next five weeks. I hope you enjoy this trip back to 1988 with me.

#10 The Sugarcubes “Life’s too good”

Nowadays, we have the international sensations Sigur Rós and Of Monsters and Men but before The Sugarcubes hit the scene, we hadn’t heard much rock music from Iceland. The six-piece alternative outfit were made up of veterans of different music groups from the Reykjavik scene. They released three full-length albums in their four year existence, though none as impactful as their debut, “Life’s too good”. Admittedly, I didn’t first listen to the album until well after their former frontwoman, Björk, had established her solo career with her excellent first two records. However, I have grown to love the quirky, punk-inflected DIY rock of The Sugarcubes’ debut. And it doesn’t at all sound thirty years old.

Gateway tune: “Birthday”

#9 Erasure “The innocents”

Here is an album that I was definitely listening to in high school, though perhaps not as early as 1988. “The innocents” was Erasure’s third full-length album and first to hit the top 10 in the UK charts, spawning a number of hit singles. The duo of Vince Clark and Andy Bell took 80s synth pop and made a career out of getting people out on the club dance floors. I love many of their singles but this is the only one of their albums that I love all the way through. I am well aware that it could be nostalgia factor here, given that this is the first of theirs that I listened to after my friend John made a copy of it on cassette for me.

Gateway tune: “Chains of love”

#8 Billy Bragg “Worker’s playtime”

I got into Billy Bragg with the album after this one, 1991’s “Don’t try this at home”, during my final year of high school and only went back to discover this previous album a few years later, when one of my university housemates Meagan had it in her CD collection. “Don’t try this at home” is considered by many his attempt at pop but in 1988 Bragg was still mixing his prototypical protest songs with songs on love. He usually performs these songs live solo on stage with his electric guitar but on record, he had a full band with him, though the music is typically secondary to his words. “Workers playtime” is his third album and is chock full of classics and fan favourites like “Must I paint you a picture?”, “She’s got a new spell”, and the one below, “Waiting for the great leap forwards”.

Gateway tune: “Waiting for the great leap forwards”

#7 Jane’s Addiction “Nothing’s shocking”

Jane’s Addiction is another artist I was listening to by the end of high school, the introduction coming with the album following the one on this list, in this case, 1990’s “Ritual de lo Habitual”. In 1988, though, the quartet led by founding members Perry Farrell and Eric Avery, and including Dave Navarro and Stephen Perkins, were releasing their second album, their major label debut, “Nothing’s shocking”. Here, the group re-recorded a couple of tracks that appeared on their ‘live’ self-titled debut album and added some explosive new ones that mixed metal, surf, glam, funk, and punk. They were a hard-living group and it shows in the raw angst on so many of the songs here.

Gateway tune: “Jane says”

#6 Leonard Cohen “I’m your man”

I’m hoping that Canada’s singer/songwriter/poet, Leonard Cohen, needs no introduction to anyone that lands on these pages. His eighth studio album, “I’m your man”, was the first CD I owned by the influential lyricist, after being introduced to him by way of the appearance of “Everybody knows” a couple years later in the film “Pump up the volume”, a favourite of mine at the time. The production and instrumentation on this album definitely sound of its time but Cohen’s rich and deep vocals and excellent lyrics allow you to forgive him. So many great tracks, like the title track, “First we take manhattan”, and the aforementioned, “Everybody knows”. How could I not include this here?

Gateway tune: “Everybody knows”

Check back next Thursday for album #5 on this list. In the meantime, you can check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.