One hopes that it will actually be a good album, otherwise all this wilful inscrutability will look a bit silly, won't it?

The Angry Robot's July 8, 2002 entry discusses music from the 80's that doesn't suck. It's a worthy subject given the current tendency for retro radio shows (and whole channels, such as Austin's 107.7) to consider stuff like Toni Basil and Rick Astley representative of the whole decade.

Here's my addition to (and partial recapitulation of) the Robot's list of Eighties Music That Doesn't Suck:

John Cale - Music For A New Society

After a frenzy of inspired post-Velvet Underground albums in the Seventies, Cale's Eighties output was mostly disappointing. This album, though, is among his best. The arrangements are sparse, understated, ambient, and perfectly suited to the songs they accompany. The songs have that mixed-up ring of truth that encompasses melancholy and joy, love and anger, peace and paranoia all at once.

Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden

Only six years after their inauspicious debut as a Duran Duran clone, Talk Talk had evolved into a completely different band. Polyrhythms, jazz textures, organic acoustic sounds, and wild textural and dynamic shifts abound on this cathartic, emotionally expressive album.

Cocteau Twins - Love's Easy Tears

The Angry Robot chose Treasure, but Love's Easy Tears was the EP that introduced me to the Cocteau Twins. I heard it by accident in a boring chain record store in a sad small-town mall, and I was transfixed. I thought it must be what the singing of angels sounds like. This and the other Cocteau EP releases of the Eighties are at the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment in the EP format.

XTC - Sylarking

Little known fact: "Dear God" was not originally on the album, and it was brilliant anyway. The addition of the incredibly catchy agnostic anthem after it became an unexpected B-side hit only punctuated the maturing brilliance the band already displayed on this record.

Marine Girls - Lazy Ways & Beach Party

Before Tracey Thorn joined Ben Watt to become Everything But The Girl, she was one-third of this gentle, minimalistically jazzy female trio. It's beach music, but melancholy beach music. Beach music for a quiet gray November day on a British beach tossed with salty spray, punctuated by gusts of icy wind.

Dif Juz - Extractions

Short of Vini Reilly's Durutti Column, there was nothing else in the Eighties quite like this album. Somehow it manages to synthesize all the best elements of fusion jazz, new age, goth instrumentals, and 4ADesque art-pop while avoiding the many pitfalls each of those genres presents. One of the finest instrumental albums of the Eighties. A bold, and sadly unrecapitulated statement.

Joy Division - Closer

Their last flash of brilliance before Ian Curtis chose to end his own life, and thereby the band's evolution. This album continued the restrained, melancholy sound of their preceding recordings, but added an extra emphasis to the post-punk sonic nose-thumbing at the musical establishment. Angular bridges are crossed and never retraversed, and songs end unresolved, as the band itself ended, here, at the peak of its brief but brilliant career.

10,000 Maniacs - In My Tribe

Soon after this, Natalie Merchant's pretentiousness would fly off the scale and the band would begin a long musical decline into uninspired non-cohesion. For this one shining moment, they had a near-perfect balance of earnestness, political concern, poetry, and melodic brilliance.

Dead Can Dance - Spleen and Ideal

Goths love Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun and the Robot picks The Serpent And The Egg, but I've always had a weakness for Spleen and Ideal. It's such a radical departure from their eponymous debut, and it's the record that first presented their signature sound in its fully realized glory. An album of reaching, yearning expansiveness.

Talking Heads - Remain In Light

Brian Eno's magic production touch fell benevolently on the Talking Heads in the late Seventies and early Eighties, as it had on David Bowie in his Seventies Berlin period. On this 1980 followup to the experimental 1979 opus Fear Of Music, the Eno influence finally achieves its full maturation. Elements of punk, polyrhythmic funk, world beat, electronic sounds, and ambient texturalism mingle incestuously on the large, quirky pop canvas of this album. Many of the songs here mark the apex of the band's inscrutability, yet some of them (e.g. "Once In A Lifetime") are also among their best and biggest hits.

Pixies - Doolittle

Influenced almost everything that was good about alternative rock in the Nineties. Demonstrates their impossibly wide range from sweet ballads to visceral hardcore rants to neo-surf-rock. Most bands never make an album this good. Enough said.

My Bloody Valentine - Isn't Anything

This was the album that launched a thousand shoegazer albums. More than just a sign marked "This way to Loveless", this is the album that refined MBV's pop roots into the nascent shoegazer sound. This is the album all of their contemporaries had been listening to for inspiration until 1991's Loveless emerged to surpass them all and effectively seal the fate of the genre in one towering blow. In the mangled, tortured pop of Isn't Anything are the delicious seeds of shoegazer rock's evolution, and its eventual delirious destruction.

My Angry Robot "Me, Too"s:

New Order - Power, Corruption, & Lies This Mortal Coil - Filigree & Shadow This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears Yazoo - Upstairs At Erics The Cure - The Head On The Door The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead Kate Bush - Hounds Of Love Cocteau Twins - Treasure Depeche Mode - Some Great Reward

More, In Brief:

Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones Tom Waits - Rain Dogs Nick Cave - Tender Prey They Might Be Giants - Lincoln Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses Bauhaus - In The Flat Field Galaxie 500 - On Fire Depeche Mode - Black Celebration Pretenders - Pretenders Joan Jett - Bad Reputation Frank Zappa - Jazz From Hell Orange Juice - You Can't Hide Your Love Forever The Pastels - Sittin' Pretty

It's a rare and unusual thing for an EP to achieve the kind of consummate perfection that resonates from a truly wonderful full-length album.

Of course, hardly anyone even makes EPs anymore. The CD single packed with irrelevant remixes (or else nothing at all save a radio edit) is de rigueur these days.

Still, there are those rare EPs that reach lofty heights that exceed the brilliance of all but the best albums. Cocteau Twins' Love's Easy Tears is one...completely floored me when I first heard it in a record store, stood perfectly still to hear every last note of it, thinking this must be the way that angels sing, this must be what the reflection of me who stars in all of my dreams sings as he falls to another inexorable end...

Today I'm listening to another one: the rather deceptively-named The Comeback EP by the indie electronica band Stars (on the Le Grand Magistery label, home also to Momus and Baxendale).

Anyone who heard their marvelous debut album Nightsongs is sure to be asking "Comeback? Comeback from what, precisely?"

The gentle, accomplished bittersweetness of Nightsongs made for a remarkable debut. Consequently, one might think the title merely a tongue-in-cheek joke, but as band member Torquil Campbell writes: "Nightsongs was a loving pastiche, but a pastiche nonetheless; The Comeback e.p. is easily the best, most original music we've ever made."

Indeed, this EP, in the course of 5 brief songs, propels the band to a new level of personal expression, savvy hooks, and gently-applied electronic and acoustic musical textures. More a progression than a comeback, it is in any event a brave step forward, an expansion of the New Order and Smiths influences of their debut into a wider, somewhat more sinister world.

And I could tell you in depth about each of the songs, but I won't, because I find myself returning repeatedly to "The Aspidistra Flies", the waltz-time love song that is the centerpiece of the album.

Its title an apparent homage to the George Orwell novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying, the song is an unabashedly sincere love song, declaring

All the umbrellas in London couldn't hide my love for you, All the rain on Thames-side couldn't stop it shining through

I wonder a lot about the apparent homage. The Orwell novel is a depressing tale of a young man's frustrated rebellion against money and station, and includes episodes of equally frustrated desire.

Into the midst of this reverie spins the twirling, sunny sincerity of "The Aspidistra Flies", its only hint of frustration a tendency toward the minor key.

What does it mean? I'm not entirely sure it means anything at all, except that the band really likes the book.

Or perhaps their reaction to this song is the same as mine: once they have played it once, they feel compelled to return eagerly to the beginning and play it again.

As I do, when "The Aspidistra Flies", and I feel I must, at any cost, keep it flying, keep it flying, keep it flying...