The Cult - Electric (1987)
The band's 1985 "debut" album Love was the sort of album you could build a career on with its psychedelic riffs set to a beat that no booty could deny. That's not to say this was a dance record, but "She Sells Sanctuary" could give Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax" a run for its money on '80s Night down at Dave & Buster's while the follow-up single "Rain" could have just as easily been called "Sanctuary Pt 2", which was just fine with me.
The rest of the album was a moodier, more introspective affair that yielded surprisingly stellar results. I'm not gonna lie to you, when a band dials it back two notches, this writer loses interest, yet songs like "Brother Wolf, Sister Moon" and "Black Angel" seem written for a great western movie that was never filmed because, in this story, the native Americans won.
1987's Electric, by comparison, sounds like a poorly recorded demo that somehow slipped past the gatekeepers and actually managed to get pressed up as the band's eagerly anticipated follow-up album.
See, Love was The Cult's Highway To Hell in that it got the kids' attention the good old-fashioned way (touring, word-of-mouth) and primed the machine for the knockout punch. Instead of giving us Back In Black, which was just a bigger, badder retooling of the Highway to Hell formula, The Cult gave us Powerage.
Electric, which arrived in stores three months prior to GNR's Appetite For Destruction, actually as much in common with Appetite, but where the Gunners' debut effort out-kicked Electric was in execution (the performances are stellar, with drummer Steven Adler acting as GNR's Mark Brzezicki) and the production.
Like Rubin, Clink was shooting for a transparent sound that captured the band's menace. Unlike Rubin, Clink actually managed to accomplish this while also making what was being committed to tape sound like a million dollars.
By comparison, Electric sounds like a two dollar bill. Sure, it's still money, but you're embarrassed to take it anywhere.
Tie: The Go-Go's - Vacation and The Kings - Amazon Beach
There is such a thing as a perfect album and, for the Go-Go's and the Kings, that perfection came on their first try. Most of us cannot imagine getting drafted to the big leagues and then hitting a homer our first time at bat, but that's exactly what happened.
For millions of kids, "Our Lips Are Sealed" and "Switchin' To Glide"/"This Beat Goes On" were songs you heard and, by the second verse, your wallet was already out and open. It wasn't long before they both became a part of the pop culture lexicon of the '80s.
Of course, buying a full album on the strength of one song has always been a one way ticket to Sucker City, population you, but, in this case, both Beauty & The Beat and The Kings Are Here rocked with a confident swagger that belied their rookie status.
Proving that fame, money, and endless touring leave you little time to actually come up with ten songs for your second album that are as good as the the ten songs on your first album, both bands found themselves searching under sofa cushions and inside every match book for hastily scribbled song ideas.
Kathy Valentine reached back to a previous band, The Textones, for what would become Vacation's title cut, getting immeasurable assistance from Charlotte Caffey, who, it must be said, is a stone-cold song whisperer.
Take one listen to the original and then to the Go-Go's version, for which Caffey wrote a chorus and re-arranged the entire song, coaxing a pop culture touchstone out of what could have just as easily been lost to the sands of time along with most of the rest of the Textones' catalog.
For the Kings, album opener "All The Way" proved to be the only track on their second album, Amazon Beach, that would not have stuck out like an infected thumb if it had been included on The Kings Are Here. "Got Two Girlfriends" might just be one of the dumbest songs to not have been written by Grand Funk and the rest of the album is just brutally forgettable.
The real kicker is that the intro to the song was a lone funereal organ and the sound of a someone starting their motorbike, revving it a few times for the neighbors' enjoyment, and then gunning the engine as they speed away before the song itself even starts.
It had zero to do with the song and it wasn't its own track, so you had to listen to it every time you wanted to hear the only great song on the album,
That, my friends, was a huge mistake.
Whether you're a kid at home, or a clerk in a record store, when you drop the needle on a fresh slab of vinyl you don't want to hear thirty seconds of someone starting a motorcycle before the music starts.
Needless to say, the album bombed so hard, Elektra dropped the band and took the album out of circulation for decades.
As for the Go-Go's, thanks to a title track that has since become one of their most successful singles, Vacation went on to sell enough for the band to make a third record (the better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be Talk Show).
The Clash - Cut The Crap
'Tis true, The Clash had been burning the candle at both ends, following the magnificent double-album London Calling with the equally stunning triple-album Sandinista. That wasn't just prolific, it was pathological, which is why Combat Rock felt like a four-song EP by comparison.
Add the usual drugs, ego, and global success to the mix and its a wonder the wheels stayed on as long as they did.
Cut The Crap is the sound of a corporate machine refusing to stop even after the dream has died and the band is no more. It is an awful, cynical, and pointless album that should have ruined Strummer's career, truth be told. It is sacrilege committed upon one's own legacy while that legacy is still fresh.
Strummer knew it, too, because he spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it.
Mick Jones, meanwhile, quietly went about forming Big Audio Dynamite and, when it was finally released into the world, helped usher in a whole new musical movement that Jones graciously allowed Strummer to be a part of when he helped write and produce the double-platinum No. 10 Upping Street.
Ministry - Filth Pig
Al Jourgenson wasn't just the guy who made American synth-pop bearable in 1983 with the edgier moments on Ministry's debut effort With Sympathy, but he was also the guy who didn't just show us the future, on Twitch, he came damn close to inventing it.
Of course, he had help (Adrian Sherwood, anyone?) and, before long, Uncle Al was collaborating with a host of other notable electronic artists (Luc Van Acker, Front 242, etc.) and creating quite the cottage industry here in Chicago.
Going to all new extremes in order to top the sonic attack of the previous album became a challenge that Jourgenson and then-partner Paul Barker rose to on The Land Of Rape & Honey and The Mind Is A Terrible Thing to Taste.
On Psalm 69, the band was now comprised of six full-time members and, as a result, the focus seemed to shift a bit. Ah, who are we kidding? There was no focus as Jourgenson's drug use spun out of control.
In hindsight, Psalm 69 is better than it has any right to be, which, sadly, cannot be said for Filth Pig, which is a big-budget corpse of an album - a lifeless slug beaten to a greenish pulp and served to fans who had been with Ministry through every previous [permutation, but whose journey with the band would end now.
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