Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall just missed my list of 1980 albums, having been released with a few months left in 1979.
I never got to know this album very well, unlike its 1982 follow-up, Thriller. Thriller is an album that, even at 10 years old, I knew by heart. But Off the Wall might be an even better record start to finish.
I’ve written about the band Witness, and their sophomore album Under a Sun, two times before. Once for Song of the Day #268, in April of 2009, and once for Song of the Day #1,218 in November of 2011.
Both times I referenced the only association I have with this band and this album, the fact that I bought it on the spot after hearing it play at a record store. Back when record stores were a thing, I’m sure they sold a lot of albums that way, but this is the only time I can ever remember buying a CD I’d never heard of because a clerk decided to give it a spin one afternoon.
So many of the albums I write about in these year-by-year series elicit in me the same response: I really need to listen to this one. Such is the case yet again with today’s selection, Squeeze’s third album, Argybargy.
Considering how much I love Squeeze’s 1981 classic East Side Story, along with the greatest hits collection I wore out in college, it’s a mystery why I haven’t listened to any of the dozen or so other albums they’ve released. Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford are one of the great pop songwriting duos, a pair dubbed the next Lennon and McCartney by some of their English countrymen.
The Rolling Stones essential period lasted from the mid 60s to the early 70s, when they ran off more than a dozen albums that are sexy, cerebral and alive. They faded after that, as all great music acts do, and have churned out solid if unspectacular work ever since.
But for a brief period in the late 70s and early 80s, they had a bit of a resurgence. 1978’s Some Girls and 1981’s Tattoo You are the standouts, but nestled between them, 1980’s Emotional Rescue is a serviceable collection of odds and ends.
I wrote about Bruce Springsteen’s The River nearly five years ago finished my blog post by stating “I’ve read enough about The River to know that I have to hear it in full.”
That never happened, and I sit here now writing about this celebrated 1980 album with the same thought running through my head. The River was Springsteen’s fifth album, sandwiched between Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska. It marries the somberness of those records with a pop sensibility that would show up again four years later on Born in the USA.
Meet Me In Montauk 