Best Albums of 1985
xenophobia is so dumb
Critics in 1985, or at least the ones who voted in Pazz and Jop, really got this one wrong. There was a ton of interesting stuff, but (as is usually true) approximately none of it was made by musicians over 30 working on either coast or making albums in the traditional studio system. In his essay for the year, Xgau whines that the indie rock guys pushing Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth (I still don’t care at all about the former and love the latter) had trained their ears to hear something beautiful in what sounded to nearly everyone else like high pitched squeals (he calls them “pigfuckers,” okay) and that classic rock purists elevated minor material from the Talking Heads and John Cougar Mellencamp to an undeservedly high level because the rest of the music made in 1985 was inferior to the classic rock of the 60’s and 70’s. He wants a third way, but he seems stumped about how to get there. Well, there is a third way—it’s called synthpop! But most of the best synthpop was made in the England and Japan, and I guess it was hard to hear those records in the era before the internet?
International artists in 1985 were truly mastering the studio. On the best records, the guitars sound like synths, the synths sound like guitars, and the drums sound like just about anything but a drum. Give into the robot rock! The studio’s been an instrument since about 1968: why pine for the days when the “bands were better”? There’s a hundred hooks scattered throughout records by Kate Bush, P-Model, Junko Yagami, and Strawberry Switchblade, even if they’re more like eccentric solo/duo projects than bands. And the bands may be a a little jammier and spacier than the ones from the 60’s and 70’s, but some of them are still great: The Cure, The Smiths, Robyn Hitchcock, The Waterboys, 10,000 Maniacs (British even though they’re American)…
I liked the mix of pop and punk of The Replacements’ Tim and R.E.M.’s Fables, but the rest of the top 15 in Pazz and Jop is unbelievably boring, none more so than the fantastically overrated Scarecrow by Mellencamp. Any album that’s asking for good old fashioned rock and roll during the Reagan era, no matter what Mellencamp says his intentions is, should be suspect. At least John Fogerty’s Centerfield is a little bit swamp funky, though it’s got most of the same problems as Scarecrow: it sounds plastic as rock and roll by the standards of the sixties, and it’s nowhere near plastic enough to compete with the weirdness being published all over the globe by 1985, or the revolution that began with Run-D.M.C. the previous year (their record in 1985 isn’t great) and continued with LL Cool J’s Radio this year. Heartland rock should be nastier, spacey and small (see Dire Straits) or bigger and brasher (see 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., which casts a huge shadow over this year).
Ok, enough trashing tepid mid-tempo backward looking tightwad rock from the boomers. Hip-hop and “alternative” rock are on their way, and they’ll save us forever.
Hounds of Love, Kate Bush (20 points)
I’m not sure if this one is over or underrated at this point. Most people probably only know the singles, but the whole thing really hangs together as one total vision of an artist really into Victorian-era literature and the occult and lots of layered backing vocals and insane synth tones. There’s a few New-Agey parts, but they’re nothing compared to something like the Tears for Fears album or any other typical pop album at the time. Everything that might have seemed too weird or corny back then seems completely normal at this point. The black metal voice in “Waking the Witch” kills me every time. This album is why something as boringly competent as Little Creatures definitely can’t be the best album of 1985. Bush sounds like she’s listened to just about every artist on the rest of this list (except the Boomer classic rockers) and made something that no one else could make.
Rain Dogs, Tom Waits (19 points)
It’s not as aggressive as some of his work, but it’s so pleasingly and artfully sequenced that the series of mostly slow or mid-tempo numbers has enough textual and lyrical variety to make the 54 minutes pass quickly. Throw that shit on repeat and hear something new each time—there’s much more there than the nearly perfect ballads “Hang Down Your Head” or “Downtown Train” (which sound kind of similar, but that’s ok). And if you think “Jockey Full of Bourbon” or “Diamonds and Gold” or “9th and Hennepin” are corny or pretentious (they aren’t), they’re at least short and more pop numbers are coming soon.
This is the Sea, The Waterboys (17)
Music critics missed Born in the U.S.A. Well, why not mash up the Boss with the British Invasion? This is the best pure rock album of 1985, and the only one that’s close is Tim, but unlike that one, this is a coherent and cohesive statement about longing and magic and maybe shipbuilding and how fascism sucks. My god, to have listened to music from 1985 and not listened to these first three albums!
Tim, The Replacements (15)
The singles are unimpeachable, the songs in between are why people resent the Mats for selling out, because I’d rather listen to “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” ten times than listen to “I’ll Buy” or “Lay It Down Clown” once. Luckily, those two are the only bad songs on this album. The “mistakes” on the old albums are twice as fun, but the middle run of songs on Tim (“Kiss Me on the Bus” through “Bastards of Young”) are better than about any five-song run they ever came up with before or after.
Meat is Murder, The Smiths (14 points)
Do music critics really love meat so much that they’re mad about a track where Morrisey rambles about his veganism a bunch? It’s the last track, just skip it. That makes the whole album about a 33 minute EP, and the rest of the tracks are perfect: reverb-drenched folk rock with incredible earworms, dreamy production, and if you listen to Morrisey’s voice as texture and ignore most of the actual content, a perfect fit next to the rest of the band. This is the best Smiths album (fewest ballads per capita, people forget about the snoozers/cringers on The Queen is Dead), and even “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” is mostly made up of that beautiful coda so I like it too.
Karkador, P-Model (14)
This sounds about as ahead of its time as Hounds of Love, and it probably deserves an even higher score. The drums on “Cyborg”! The flute on “Leak”! I want everyone to listen to Karkador, and I never would have found it except it showed up on the same Rate Your Music list from 1985 as Locura.
Locura, Virus (12)
I found this one on Rate Your Music, and it pretty much justifies checking out that website in general. It's one of my favorite surprises of this year. All those Pazz and Jop guys who liked Sade and Prefab Sprout and Little Creatures and Kate Bush: this also has all the things that makes those albums good. It’s got a lot of bounce, about 4-5 hooks per song, and lyrics I mostly don’t understand, which is also what makes R.E.M. pretty great.
Fegmania!, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians (10)
For goth rock this is nearly as good as those other two albums, but it’s a little bit more conventionally rock sounding than either of those albums or most of the next albums, which is probably what made it show up on Pazz and Jop in 1985. It’s much funnier and weirder than what the Heads or R.E.M. were doing this year which is why it’s in a slightly higher tier.
Diamond Life, Sade (10)
Like the next two albums on this list, there’s some extremely unfashionable (smooth jazz!) sounds on here, but that’s what makes them good. I’m sure I’d hate most of Sade’s record collection, but her voice is perfect: soft and hard, rich and energetic. The life she’s describing feels both clear and opaque, and her band understands how to keep things, um, extremely smooth while adding in enough interesting touches that it feels like humans made this and not machines. Like the Prefab Sprout album, this one only makes sense to me know because of Destroyer’s Kaputt, and that’s fine: this isn’t made for teenagers, it’s for adults.
The Head on the Door, The Cure (10)
Christgau’s hatred for The Cure, one of the best and most influential bands of the 80’s, was and remains one of his worst takes, and I’m resentful of this hatred because it seems like it’s something that he was able to convince all the other music critics in Pazz and Jop of as well. This one’s not as good as their next three albums, but it’s still better on average than most everything else with guitars and synths from 1985. There’s a thousand bands who are going to listen to the Cure as teenagers in the 80’s and think, man, I should make a band. And unlike the Smiths, you don’t have to mostly ignore the lyrics: they’re mopey, for sure, but also funny and not cruel.
Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits (8)
It’s just as smooth as Diamond Life, but twice as nasty. The self-hatred here is so intense! I wish he wasn’t dropping f-bombs on “Money for Nothing,” it doesn’t exactly do the Randy Newman-esque thing he thinks it’s doing, but I also don’t think it disqualifies his entire project, which seems to be taking classic rock and running it through a blender until it turns Soylent Green. Drink up!
The Wishing Chair, 10,000 Maniacs (7)
They sort of sound like a mix of the English goth bands that I think are better than most of the music from this year, R.E.M., and The Waterboys, but with an insanely talented singer who’s better than any of those bands and also cornier. Merchant’s traditionalist bona fides aside, these are catchy songs that certainly yielded a million traditionalist indie rock bands. I’d rather listen to R.E.M. or the English goth bands, but revisiting this album a few times didn’t feel bad at all.
Steve McQueen, Prefab Sprout (7)
A mix of XTC, Elvis Costello, and Rick Astley: it’s the latter that makes this kind of a tough hang, though I’ve come around to that kind of synth pop since Destroyer’s Kaputt and getting into Sade and Dylan’s 80’s output (thanks Jokermen). The parts that are like the (good) XTC records and the Elvis Costello records are what make this interesting, and the mix of so many different styles helps explain why it’s so beloved in the U.K. There are four songs out of the eleven here that are so corny that I can’t give it more than 7 points.
Communication, Junko Yagami (7)
I guess this genre is called “city pop”? The subreddit calls it “urban driving music from Japan.” Idk, there’s a lag in the middle for a few ballads, but otherwise, this is just as funky (meaning, not exactly, but also kind of) and twice as weird as Little Creatures.
Little Creatures, Talking Heads (5)
I also have this album on vinyl and I remember thinking, wow, this has got some good songs on it, it’s probably underrated, because it’s still pretty decent compared to the total genius of the albums preceding it. When I saw that it won Pazz and Jop in 1985 I immediately turned on it. This is definitely minor Heads. It already sounds more like a David Byrne solo project than a true band: Tom Tom Club hadn’t really been a success, but Frantz and Weymouth seem, um, bored on this album.
Fables of the Reconstruction, R.E.M. (5)
Just like his hatred of The Cure, Xgau’s hatred of R.E.M. looks so stupid in retrospect. All the alt bands of the 90’s and 00’s loved one or both of these bands! This album is kind of the More Songs about Buildings and Food of R.E.M.; I kind of consider Murmur and Reckoning as one project and then this one’s a little more gussied up but not as smooth as their later stuff. It’s not one of their top five albums (they have a lot more albums than the Heads), but it’s extremely solid minor R.E.M.
Centerfield, John Fogerty (5)
Why do I hate John Cougar Mellencamp and like John Fogerty? Maybe because Fogerty knew he was by 1985 and made a fun record, and Mellencamp was a brooder convinced he’d made an American classic by appealing to people’s worst instincts? I don’t hate 60’s style rock, and I had no idea Fogerty still had it this late in the game. It’s about as adventurous as Little Creatures, with just as many pop hits.
Up on the Sun, Meat Puppets (5)
The vocal delivery is a little tough to swallow (there’s a reason that the most famous Puppets songs are the ones Nirvana covered with Kurt singing), but the guitar tone and arrangements are shockingly beautiful. The instrumental tracks are maybe the best tracks on this album, though I was eventually charmed by the vocals and just settled into the whole project. The “Hot Pink” suite broken up into three tracks is so charmingly weird, and the last one is a bit of a snoozer, but that doesn’t undermine the whole thing, it makes it more human. I didn’t realize that Ween took…basically everything from these guys!
Strawberry Switchblade, Strawberry Switchblade (5 points)
A pleasant surprise! Just like Prefab Sprout, I’d never heard this band before, and it felt like the New Order album that I actually wanted from this year. The rhythms are nearly all danceable, and the vocals are extremely fun. I’m not sure they would have gotten better if they made another record, but this one is just fine.
Rites of Spring, Rites of Spring (5)
Not so fast, not so loud: it’s a new way of thinking about punk music that doesn’t fall into some of the problems that the Mekons run into, because Rites of Spring are band nerds who also love to scream and thrash around. There’s so many bands that are influenced by this record, and I love a lot of those bands, so they deserve 5 points. They deserve 5 points “For Want of” at least!
Radio, LL Cool J (Honorable Mention)
It’s not that hard to skip the songs about being a smooth lover or a scold and marvel at the skill in the other 8 songs. DJ Cut Creator adds an unflashy elegance to the rhythms that’s absent in the Run-D.M.C. record from this year, and while few of the tracks except “Rock the Bells” or “I Need A Beat” rise to the level of the best music on Licensed to Ill or Raising Hell from 1986, but there’s something satisfying about the minimalism here.
15 Singles
“Rock the Bells,” LL Cool J*
“The Boys of Summer,” Don Henley
“Into the Groove,” Madonna
“Raspberry Beret,” Prince
"Sally MacLennane,” The Pogues
“Head over Heels,” Tears for Fears
“Roxane’s Revenge,” Roxanne Shanté
“Angel,” Madonna
“Johnny Come Home,” Fine Young Cannibals
“Everybody Wants to Rule The World,” Tears for Fears
“Shout,” Tears for Fears
“Rain on the Scarecrow,” John Cougar Mellencamp
“Makes No Sense at All,” Hüsker Dü
“Just Like Heaven,” The Jesus and Mary Chain
“The Perfect Kiss,” New Order