I don’t return to Elvis Costello’s 1991 album Mighty Like a Rose very often, but when it first came out I was in love with it.
A sticker on the album’s cover promised it was his best, most inventive work since Imperial Bedroom, which was overselling it, but it does have its share of baroque gems.
While New Wave was the defining sound of the early 80s, the #1 album of 1982 was the self-titled debut by prog-rock band Asia. Asia spent more than two months at the top of the U.S. album chart.
The band was created by former members of Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and their debut album outsold anything any of those other bands ever produced.
I own Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, another critically-acclaimed 1982 album, but I can’t say I’ve ever listened to it in full.
I digitally borrowed this record from frequent commenter Dana, who counts it among his favorites. I expect we’ll get an illuminating treatise on the album from him sometime Thursday morning.
ABC isn’t one of the better-known New Wave bands (at least not to me) but they are one of the most critically-acclaimed. Their 1982 debut album, The Lexicon of Love, received heaps of praise and a spot on many publications’ year-end lists.
‘The Look of Love’ was the album’s biggest hit, reaching the top five in the U.K. and the top 20 in the U.S. Though I’m hard-pressed to name any songs by ABC, this one sounds instantly familiar. And wonderful.
I think of Depeche Mode as a quintessential 80s band. But oddly enough, it took them the whole decade to arrive at their pinnacle achievement, 1990’s Violator. That record featured two of their biggest hits, ‘Personal Jesus‘ and ‘Enjoy the Silence.’ And they released as many albums after Violator as they did before it.
The band spent the 80s tweaking their New Wave sound, which met with more commercial success in their native England than on this side of the pond.
