Twenty years since their pop music debut, Duran Duran issued another greatest-hits collection. As if 1989's Decade wasn't stellar enough, this select package was much more solid. Greatest showcased the band's early days of glam rock décor and new romanticism to the alluring sophistication Duran Duran exuded throughout the '90s. The typical synth ...
The peak of the band's industrial-gone-mainstream fusion, and still one of the best electronic music albums yet recorded, Some Great Reward still sounds great, with the band's ever-evolving musical and production skills matching even more ambitious songwriting from Martin Gore. "People Are People" appears here, but finds itself outclassed by some ...
At the time of its release, much of the fuss surrounding 1984 involved Van Halen's adoption of synthesizers on this, their sixth album -- a hoopla that was a bit of a red herring since the band had been layering in synths since their third album, Women and Children First. Those synths were either buried beneath guitars or used as texture, even on ...
Substance is a double-disc set collecting New Order's singles, including several songs that were never available on the group's albums, at least in these versions. While there are a couple of re-recordings of earlier singles, most of Substance consists of 12" single mixes designed for danceclub play. Arguably, these 12" mixes represent New Order's ...
Although there's nothing particularly out of the ordinary of Pure 80's, it nevertheless is a good, basic collection of 20 new wave hits, highlighted by such classics as "Hungry Like the Wolf," "Our House," "Relax," "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," "Video Killed the Radio Star," "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," and Soft Cell's timeless ...
The Best of Howard Jones compiles all the necessary material ever put forth by this pop synthesizer master and is overabundant with a hearty 18 tracks. Jones had a remarkable eight Top 40 singles throughout the course of the mid-1980s, churning out keyboard laden dance/pop songs that were bright and lively. His debut album, Human's Lib, was a ...
Preceding the elaborate 2005 reissues of Eurythmics' eight proper albums by a month, The Ultimate Collection narrowly trumps 1991's Greatest Hits since it features remastered sound and a more extensive track list. While it does not contain "Don't Ask Me Again," opting to instead select a couple merely decent highlights from 1999's Peace, two new ...
Originally released by the fledgling Enigma Records in 1982 and picked up by Geffen in early 1983 when the lascivious novelty single "Sex (I'm A...)" started picking up radio attention, Pleasure Victim is a frankly exploitative little slab of synth pop cynicism, so baldly crass in its positioning of lead singer Terri Nunn as a sex kitten (posing ...
Vince Clarke can claim involvement in two stunning debuts in only two years: Depeche Mode's Speak and Spell and Yaz's Upstairs at Eric's. While Speak and Spell is, by far, the more consistent record, Upstairs at Eric's is wholly more satisfying, beating the Depeche record on substance and ambition, and is light years ahead in emotion. "Don't Go" ...
Anyone who dismissed a-ha as a one-hit wonder must have missed out on the band's fine debut, Hunting High and Low. Though the band spawned many further hits across the rest of the world, "Take on Me" exploded in the States and the group never cracked the top of the charts again. It's a shame, because the album contains a handful of songs that ...
Led Zeppelin have been worshipped intensely by generations of rock musicians ever since the 1969 release of their first of eight massively influential studio recordings. Despite a near-constant, and unrealistically cool critical reception, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and John Bohnam's beyond-iconic status was hardly ever in doubt, ...
Alphaville's 1984 debut, Forever Young, deserves to be viewed as a classic synth pop album. There's no doubting that Germans are behind the crystalline Teutonic textures and massive beats that permeate the album, but vocalist Marian Gold's impressive ability to handle a Bryan Ferry croon and many impassioned high passages meant the album would ...
Any fan of John Hughes or '80s teen culture remembers the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club for one reason: Simple Minds' stone classic "Don't You (Forget About Me)." One of the few new wave songs that could seriously be called an anthem, the song made an indelible impression on an entire generation, which is no exaggeration for many Gen-Xers. "Don ...
As the auteur of post-punk suburban adolescence, director John Hughes appropriately enhanced his '80s movies with relatively harmless new wave soundtracks. Where earlier films like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles included the occasional Wang Chung or Simple Minds track, though, 1986's Pretty in Pink boasted a full lineup of "rock of the ...
The full addition of Alan Wilder to Depeche Mode's lineup created a perfect troika that would last another 11 years, as the combination of Martin Gore's songwriting, Wilder's arranging, and David Gahan's singing and live star power resulted in an ever more compelling series of albums and singles. Construction Time Again, the new lineup's first ...
While not quite as strong as the band's debut, Scoundrel Days is still a-ha succeeding as a marketed "pretty boy" band which can connect musically and lyrically as much as any musical sacred cow. The opening two songs alone make for one of the best one-two opening punches around: the tense edge of the title track, featuring one of Morten Harket's ...
When it was played on modern rock radio stations in 1988, Camouflage had everybody duped with "The Great Commandment." With its chilly synths, robotic percussion, and gloomy vocals, the song was a Depeche Mode doppelganger. Similarly, Camouflage's debut album Voices & Images is the sound of young men who couldn't stop playing Depeche Mode's Black ...
Replacing the original Catching Up with Depeche Mode compilation, Singles 81>85 subtracts two tracks -- the lightweight curiosity "Flexible" and "Fly on the Windscreen," which surfaced to better effect on Black Celebration -- and adds two, the full six-minute remix of "Just Can't Get Enough" and the original version of "Photographic," Depeche's ...
Polydor's Level Best is a thorough, successful overview of the smooth, jazzy British sophisti-pop outfit, containing all of their biggest hits and best material, including the sublime "Something About You." At 18 tracks, it may run a little long, but it still is as comprehensive a summary of Level 42's career as could be hoped. ~ Stephen Thomas ...
It took Depeche Mode only four years to assemble their first singles compilation, but 12 to assemble The Singles 86>98. Appropriately, the second set was much more ambitious than The Singles 81>85, spanning two discs and 20 songs, plus a live version of "Everything Counts." The Singles 86>98 was an album that many fans, both casual and hardcore, ...
While Greatest Hits contains all of the truly necessary items, it also tends to overlook some of the better album tracks from Devo's early period (easily their best work) in favor of a more balanced overview, which means that later albums receive more exposure than they really deserve. The import collection Hot Potatoes: The Best of Devo has ...
Liverpool's A Flock of Seagulls are best remembered for lead singer Mike Score's hair (and their number ten hit "I Ran [So Far Away]"). The quartet actually scored three lesser hits aside from that archetypal '80s smash. The kinetic "A Space Age Love Song"; the cascading, multi-layered "Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)"; and the sweeping ...
Men Without Hats broke big with their 1982 debut, Rhythm of Youth. Though they never maintained that level of success, their third album Pop Goes the World was a smart, well-crafted, woefully underrated offering. The album chronicles the quest for and backlash of fame on songs like the title track, on which Ivan sings "Johnny and Jenny had a crazy ...
Once the soundtrack to the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore romantic comedy The Wedding Singer climbed into the Top Ten, the appearance of Wedding Singer 2 was nearly a sure thing. After all, Grosse Pointe Blank and Romy & Michele's High School Reunion, two other '80s-themed films with predominantly new wave soundtracks, spun off two hit albums apiece, ...
Returning after a two-year recording hiatus (during which bandleader Danny Elfman recorded a solo album), Oingo Boingo forsook the excesses of smart-aleck humor and quirky production that had led critics almost universally to dismiss the band's first four albums. The sound is still maybe just a bit too uptight and over-determined, but the horn ...
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