A decade ago, I wrote a series of entries ranking my favorite albums from 1985 to 2004. My collection has expanded greatly since then, particularly in the last five years. So I wanted to see what has changed in 10 years.
And now we enter some new territory. I didn’t start collecting music in earnest till 1985, and I wouldn’t start exploring catalog music till 2005. Raiding thrift shops has allowed me to fill in a lot of history, which is why were expanding the range of this retrospective to as far back as 1978. Today, we start with 1984.
Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George
The Replacements, Let It Be
Soundtrack, Amadeus
Andersson / Rice / Ulvaeus, Chess
Art of Noise, Who’s Afraid of? … the Art of Noise!
Madonna, Like a Virgin
Prince and the Revolution, Purple Rain
Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA
Arvo Pärt, Tabula Rasa
Thompson Twins, Into the Gap
Other favorites from the year:
Guadalcanal Diary, Walking in the Shadows of the Big Man
Nena, 99 Luftballons
Eurythmics, 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother)
Sade, Diamond Life
I was much more into arcade video games — the classic era of Pac-Man and Galaga — than music in 1984. The only album I owned from that time is 99 Luftballons. Everything else I would discover later.
My 12-year-old self would not have known what to make of the Replacements or Arvo Pärt. He would have scoffed and wretched over the idea that Madonna or Prince could rank on such a list. They were his brother’s albums, after all.
He certainly did not have the sophistication or patience for two LPs of Mozart, although he might have really liked watching Amadeus.
And he would have definitely protested the inclusion of Bruce Springsteen on the list, all the while gazing lustily after the cover of Born in the USA.
He would have totally understood the Thompson Twins, though.
A decade ago, I wrote a series of entries ranking my favorite albums from 1985 to 2004. My collection has expanded greatly since then, particularly in the last five years. So I wanted to see what has changed in 10 years.
This list is the last of the original years covered in my previous survey. The Favorite 10 hasn’t changed, but the extended list has gotten longer.
Tears for Fears, Songs from the Big Chair
Sting, The Dream of the Blue Turtles
Arcadia, So Red the Rose
ABC, How to Be a Zillionaire!
10,000 Manaics, The Wishing Chair
Clannad, Macalla
Kate Bush, Hounds of Love
Soundtrack, Macross Song Collection
Midnight Oil, Red Sails in the Sunset
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Requiem
Other favorites from the year::
Camper Van Beethoven, Telephone Free Landslide Victory
Eurythmics, Be Yourself Tonight
Hiroshima, Another Place
The Pogues, Rum Sodomy and the Lash
Simple Minds, Once Upon a Time
Sade, Promise
Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising
The Replacements, Tim
The Outfield, Play Deep
INXS, Listen Like Thieves
Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force
The Power Station, The Power Station
The Family, The Family
Prince and the Revolution, Around the World in a Day
Younger Me would approve of most of this list.
He would have gasped at the inclusion of Prince, considering the Sibling Rivalry Collection Race was at its height, and this kind of intrusion would be accompanied by a drubbing.
And he would groaned at the inclusion of The Outfield. Older Me would then advise him to wait 20 years before a real appreciation could begin.
I capped this survey at 1985 because my collection before that year wasn’t extensive enough for much punditry. Weekly visits to thrift shops in the last three years have allowed me to fill in enough gaps to keep going till 1978.
A decade ago, I wrote a series of entries ranking my favorite albums from 1985 to 2004. My collection has expanded greatly since then, particularly in the last five years. So I wanted to see what has changed in 10 years.
I had discovered so much music in 1987 that at the time, I thought 1988 was a dud by comparison. Over the years, I’ve discovered that is not the case. The Favorite 10 doesn’t change from the original list, but look at that expanded list.
In Tua Nua, The Long Acre
Midnight Oil, Diesel and Dust
Kronos Quartet, Winter Was Hard
The Sugarcubes, Life’s Too Good
Enya, Watermark
Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman
Living Colour, Vivid
Duran Duran, Big Thing
Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation
The Dead Milkmen, Beelzebubba
Other favorites from the year:
Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods
John Adams, Nixon in China
Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Savvy Show Stoppers
Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
Sarah McLachlan, Touch
Erasure, The Innocents
Sade, Stronger Than Pride
The Pogues, If I Should Fall from Grace with God
The Waterboys, Fisherman’s Blues
The Godfathers, Birth, School, Work, Death
Camouflage, Voices & Images
Ambitious Lovers, Greed
Iron Path, Iron Path
Toni Childs, Union
R.E.M., Green
Throwing Muses, House Tornado
Pixies, Surfer Rosa
N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton
Information Society, Information Society
Ofra Haza, Shaday
The Smiths, Rank
Lucinda Williams, Lucinda Williams
I guess I really limited the expanded list 10 years ago so I wouldn’t have to do so much writing. The Pogues, the Waterboys, the Godfathers, Ambitious Lovers, Ofra Haza, the Smiths and Lucinda Williams would not have appeared on that list — I’ve discovered those albums only in the last 6 years.
A decade ago, I wrote a series of entries ranking my favorite albums from 1985 to 2004. My collection has expanded greatly since then, particularly in the last five years. So I wanted to see what has changed in 10 years.
We’ve actually revisited 1992 earlier in the year, and this list hasn’t changed, although I did tack on L7 and Helmet in the extended list.
Wayne Horvitz / The President, Miracle Mile
Máire Brennan, Máire
Henryk Górecki, Symphony No. 3 (Dawn Upshaw, David Zinman, London Sinfonietta)
k.d. lang, Ingenue
Sade, Love Deluxe
En Vogue, Funky Divas
Prince and the New Power Generation, 0(+> (Love Symbol Album)
Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers, At the Ryman
Kronos Quartet, Pieces of Africa
Robin Holcomb, Rockabye
Other favorites from the year:
The Sugarcubes, Stick Around for Joy
Faith No More, Angel Dust
Sonic Youth, Dirty
Helmet, Meantime
L7, Bricks Are Heavy
Helmet got caught up in the grunge craze of the early ’90s, even though they were clearly not grunge. Wikipedia says Helmet’s staccato riffage would influence Mastodon, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Korn and Linkin Park.
I’ll admit I picked up Meantime because of the grunge-adjacent marketing hype. I didn’t hold onto it, but like Shudder to Think’s Pony Express Record, I couldn’t shake it. So I brought it back into my collection when it was reissued on vinyl earlier in the year.
Bricks Are Heavy also suffered a bit of guilt by association. Butch Vig had been doing miraculous work with Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana and Sonic Youth. Surely, L7 would follow in that vein. I didn’t warm up to it. I’m not sure how 25 years turned around my perception of the album, but it did.
A decade ago, I wrote a series of entries ranking my favorite albums from 1985 to 2004. My collection has expanded greatly since then, particularly in the last five years. So I wanted to see what has changed in 10 years.
I’m flabbergasted by the idea that, as of this writing, the year 2000 is nearly 20 years ago. As much as I lionize the music I heard in high school, the music of my late 20s has been incredibly influential, perhaps professionally as well as personally. Thus, we don’t see much change from the original list.
Shiina Ringo, Shouso Strip
Cocco, Rapunzel
NUMBER GIRL, SAPPUKEI
SUPERCAR, Futurama
eX-Girl, Big When Far, Small When Close
Sleater-Kinney, All Hands on the Bad One
Idlewild, 100 Broken Windows
FEED, Make Every Stardust Shimmer!
Tomosaka Rie, “Shoujo Robot”
Sade, Lovers Rock
Other favorites from the year:
Do As Infinity, Break of Dawn
Yaida Hitomi, daiya-monde
PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
OBLIVION DUST, Butterfly Head
At the Drive-In, Relationship of Command
L’Arc~en~Ciel, REAL
Bonnie Pink, Let Go
MISSILE GIRL SCOOT, Fiesta!
Smashing Pumpkins, MACHINA/The Machine of God
m-flo, Planet Shining
Juanes, Fíate Bien
Emmylou Harris, Red Dirt Girl
U2, All That You Can’t Leave Behind
La Ley, Uno
Sinéad O’Connor, Faith and Courage
Soundtrack, High Fidelity
BBMak, Sooner or Later
At the time of its release, I was just glad All That You Can’t Leave Behind was not a continuation of Pop. The recent vinyl reissue of the album, unfortunately, reveals its shortcomings. Thus, it loses its original ranking in the Favorite 10.
Plot twist: I panned 2004’s How to Build an Atomic Bomb, but that album has endured far better than All That You Can’t Leave Behind. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Idlewild’s 1000 Broken Windows takes the spot vacated by U2.
Do As Infinity probably could have held onto its place in the Favorite 10 on the strength of “Raven” alone. At the time, most J-Pop I had encountered relied heavily on keyboards and drum machines, so a karaoke-ready band with crunchy guitars felt novel to me.
I can’t say I love Break of Dawn as much now. It’s rare that singles displace albums for the Favorite 10, but all three tracks on “Shoujo Robot” hint at an awesome album I wish Shiina Ringo and Tomosaka Rie recorded.
The extended list is really just all the titles that could have legitimately competed for that bottom spot on the Favorite 10.
A decade ago, I wrote a series of entries ranking my favorite albums from 1985 to 2004. My collection has expanded greatly since then, particularly in the last five years. So I wanted to see what has changed in 10 years.
2010 was a solid year in music, led by strong showings from Shiina Ringo and Cocco. So this version of the Favorite Edition list doesn’t stray much from the original.
Tokyo Jihen, Sports
Cocco, Emerald
Renée Fleming, Dark Hope
LOVE PSYCHEDELICO, ABBOT KINNEY
Res, Black.Girls.Rock!
Royal Wood, The Waiting
KIMONOS, Kimonos
ACO, devil’s hands
The Drums, The Drums
Oriental Love Ring, In This World
Other favorites from the year:
Jónsi, Go
LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening
Sade, Soldier of Love
Friday Night Lights, Original Television Soundtrack, Vol. 2
TOUMING MAGAZINE, Our Soul Music
I was always a bit ambivalent about ranking LCD Soundsystem over Sade, so the late discovery of The Drums banished both from the Favorite 10.
I’ve been waiting for an album by Oriental Love Ring for more than 30 years, so learning it happened — albeit two years after it was released — meant something had to give. And it fell to Jónsi.
The final retroactive addition to the list is the debut album by TOUMING MAGAZINE. I try not to translate foreign language album titles, but since my traditional Chinese is non-existent, it’s safest to give a correct English title than a mangled transliterated one.
Google Translate says 我們的靈魂樂 is pronounced “Wǒmen de línghún lè”. The band says the title is Our Soul Music.
Back in 2008, I wrote a series of entries detailing my favorite albums from various decades. For the longest time, I held an incredibly dim view of 1992. Compared the years preceding and following, 1992 felt like a creative malaise had spread throughout the music industry.
Bands that used to be underground found themselves to be popular, and under this newfound, wide-scale scrutiny, some of them cracked.
Or so I thought.
I had only turned 20 years old, an age when the dopamine hit from discovering new music left a neophyte intoxicated. I wanted every album to matter, and the ones that didn’t received a harsh judgment.
Twenty-five years later, I’ve got more of an education on where 1992 fit in the larger scheme of things, and of course, I got it wrong. This old entry details all the ways I got it wrong. So let’s make it right.
Here’s a revised list of the Favorite Edition 1992.
Wayne Horvitz/The President, Miracle Mile
Máire Brennan, Máire
Henryk Górecki, Symphony No. 3 (Dawn Upshaw, David Zinman, London Sinfonietta)
k.d. lang, Ingenue
Sade, Love Deluxe
En Vogue, Funky Divas
Prince and the New Power Generation, 0(+> (Love Symbol Album)
Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers, At the Ryman
Kronos Quartet, Pieces of Africa
Robin Holcomb, Rockabye
Honorable mention
The Sugarcubes, Stick Around for Joy
Faith No More, Angel Dust
Sonic Youth, Dirty
The original list stopped at five items, with a longer list of albums accompanied by explanations for why they weren’t favorites. In some cases, I’ve completely changed my mind.
At the time, Love Deluxe was such a drastic turn for Sade that I thought something went wrong. It would take another 18 years for Love Deluxe to reveal itself as the start of a new creative era, one marked by extreme pauses between albums. This early ’90s album shares more with its successors in 2000 and 2010 than it did with 1988’s Stronger than Pride.
I also got a chance to revisit Ingenue after the entry was written, and it’s place on the favorite list is well anchored.
Other albums would not have appeared on the list at the time it was written. Prince was unexplored territory for me in 2008, so I wouldn’t have even thought to include the Love Symbol album. En Vogue wouldn’t have gotten past my raging rock snobbery.
The rest of the albums on the list could have only been included after much research. Dirty makes a lot more sense if a Sonic Youth novice also considers Sister and EVOL. At the Ryman would not make sense to someone who’s only exposure to Emmylou Harris was Wrecking Ball.
My first reaction as I compiled this entry was, “Yay! Some of my favorite artists are releasing new music!” My second reaction was, “Why are they all waiting till April?”
Explosions in the Sky, The Wilderness, April 1
Take Care, Take Care, Take Care tread familiar territory and felt a bit worn out. The preceding single from this new album, “Disintegration Anxiety”, sounds like the band is aiming for a new sound. I hope it’s a successful effort.
Duran Duran, Girls on Film – 1979 Demo, April 1
Andy Wickett offers a CD-R of the 1979 Duran Duran demo, but it looks like he’s licensed it to Cleopatra for a proper reissue.
Ben Watt, Fever Dream, April 8
I find it fascinating how Ben Watt has spent years building his DJ creds, but his solo work so far has nothing to do with the club.
Sturgill Simpson, A Sailor’s Guide to the Earth, April 15
Sturgill Simpson + concept album via Marvin Gaye = Take my money, please!
Rufus Wainwright, Take All My Loves: Nine Shakespeare Sonnets, April 22
I put more stock in Rufus Wainwright’s classical creds than any other pop star because his first effort in the genre was a full-blown opera.
UA, JaPo, May 11
I wondered where UA has been. She deserved a long break after more than a decade of releasing albums year after year. But which UA are we going to get — the adventurer or the tunesmith?
Ty Herndon, TBD, May 15
At the end of his El Corazón acoustic set back in Feb. 2016, Ty Herndon announced his new album would arrive on May 15, his first since coming out in 2014.
Vinyl
Sade, The Best of Sade, March 11
I already have the first three Sade albums on vinyl, and this compilation pretty much covers those albums. I don’t really need this record, but … I want it.
Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose, March 18
Has it really been more than a decade since Loretta Lynn did that whole thing with Jack White?
Janet Jackson, Unbreakable, April 1
I imagine all the clogged up record pressing plants prevented this album from being released at the same time as the CD.
Sonic Youth, Sister, April 8
Gradus ad Daydream Nation.
Patty Griffin, 1000 Kisses, April 15
This reissue will do nicely till Flaming Red gets somewhere on the release schedule.
![[Sinéad O'Connor - I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/SinadOConnorImNotBoss327463_f.jpeg)
![[Thompson Twins - Into the Gap]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ThompsonTwinsIntotheGap170433_f-300x289.jpg)
![[The Outfield - Play Deep]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TheOutfieldPlayDeep1985142461_f-300x294.jpeg)
![[The Waterboys - Fisherman's Blues]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/TheWaterboysFishermansBl144803_f-300x268.jpg)
![[Helmet - Meantime]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/HelmetMeantime1992167799_f-300x300.jpg)
![[Tomosaka Rie - Shoujo Robot]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/200032388_f-300x267.jpg)
![[TOUMING MAGAZINE - Our Soul Music]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/TOUMINGMAGAZINEBokutachin57098_f-300x262.jpg)
![[NUMBER GIRL - Shibuya ROCKTRANSFORMED Joutai]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/27561G7K4_f-259x300.jpg)
![[Wayne Horvitz/The President - Miracle Mile]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/WayneHorvitzThePresident14088_f-300x300.jpg)
![[Explosions in the Sky - The Wilderness]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/explosions_in_the_sky_the_wilderness-300x300.jpg)