1982: Year of the Underwhelming Follow-Up LP

So I've done megaposts on 1979, 1981 and 1983, but what about 1982? What's the big story with that year? Well, it was an amazing year for movies and comics, certainly, but for music? 

For music, 1982 can be summed up in one word: disappointing.

I haven't quite worked it out yet but I was pretty much disappointed to some extent by damn-near everything that came out in 1982, as were a lot of other people, if sales figures are anything to go by. There were a lot of great singles that year, and even the disappointing albums had some killer cuts, but overall it was just a bit of a downer. Especially after the dark and noisy thrills 1981 had to offer.

I remember the weather was really crappy that summer as well, just to add to the overall disappointment factor. So maybe it was cosmic, like maybe it was space weather or something. 

Anyhow, there's a sliding scale of disappointment here: from a mild and wistful disappointment to Combat Rock-level "the actual f*ck is this sh*t?" I keep it all in my head, so don't ask me to give you a rating system or anything. But we may as well start with Combat Rock, since Sony is trying to wring one last penny out of the long-suffering fandom with a 40th Anniversary Edition that even the most uncritical Clash stans are disappointed with.

Artist: The Clash

Album: Combat Rock
Underwhelming follow-up to: Sandinista!

Sandinista! was a giant, sprawling mess, half of which wouldn't pass muster even as B-sides back in the Clash's glory days. But it's also a spirited, fun and wildly-creative mess. Combat Rock is none of those things. 

Combat Rock was a rescue operation undertaken in an attempt to carve a releasable album out of the double LP disaster Mick Jones had assembled while in his perpetual marijuana stupor. Everybody else - the band, their management, their record company - instantly rejected Mick's mix out of hand, so Joe Strummer and producer Glyn Johns got to work trying to make some sense of the mess. Combat Rock gets an A for effort as a salvage job, but it runs out of steam a third of the way through then lapses into a druggy, listless, tuneless slog until the bitter end. The second half has all the Rock 'n' Roll firepower of a wet fart. Forget Diet Clash, this is Castrated Clash.

Happily, there are plenty of high-energy live recordings of Combat Rock's key tracks, rendering the album completely redundant as anything but an object lesson of what happens to bands who don't stick to their guns. 

Artist: Blondie

Album: The Hunter
Underwhelming follow-up to: Autoamerican

I can't figure out this album. It's certainly no worse than Autoamerican (which is just two hit singles buttressed by pure filler), and in some ways it's better. It's certainly a lot more energetic. But its attempts to give you that widescreen Blondie-wall-of-sound just don't quite land like they had done with Eat to the Beat. I think it's a case of the band's time passing them by, after three straight years of nonstop media saturation (six if you factor in Europe).

Blondie leader Chris Stein developed a serious autoimmune condition on the The Hunter tour, putting an end to the original lineup of the band. It didn't matter anyway, since Deborah Harry had already launched her solo career, such as it was.

Artist: Queen 

Album: Hot Space
Underwhelming follow-up to: The Game 

Freddie Mercury was a musical genius, and one of the greatest singers and frontmen of all time. Queen's run from their debut to The Game is one of the finest in all of Rock history. But all good things must come to an end, and Hot Space is easily one of the dumbest, most ridiculous and most embarrassing trainwrecks ever made by a band of their stature.  

Given the runaway success of John Deacon's "Another One Bites the Dust" and Freddie's love for Munich's gay discos, you figure you'd get some fresh goes at funk. You just probably wouldn't figure how laughably generic and ineptly produced they'd all be. Just cringe after cringe after mega-cringe, Hot Space is.

Brian May and Roger Taylor pitch in some incredibly stale and blatant rewrites of earlier, far better Queen songs, and the whole thing just sounds cheap, sad and terrible. If not for "Under Pressure," recorded and released a year prior, the whole thing would be a total washout.

Wait: it pretty much was a washout. It certainly washed out Queen's US prospects for the next ten years. I never cared much for their any post-Game records anyway, so no harm done here.

Artist: Van Halen

Album: Diver Down
Underwhelming follow-up to: Fair Warning

Wait a minute, you say: "Diver Down was a huge hit and has some great cuts on it." 

That's true, but all the Van Halen fans I knew back in the day thought it was a pop sellout, largely because of their covers of "Dancing in the Streets" and "Pretty Woman." In fact, half the songs on the 31-minute long album are covers. And "Hang Em High" and "The Full Bug" are both fine, but are essentially rewrites of "Light Up the Sky" and "I'm the One",  respectively. 

I love Diver Down, but Fair Warning seemed a lot more focused and 1984 perfected the formula Diver Down reached for but couldn't quite grasp.

Artist: Pete Townsend

Album: All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes
Underwhelming follow-up to: Empty Glass 

Artist: The Who

Album: It's Hard
Underwhelming follow-up to: Face Dances

The Who performed one of their many farewell tours in 1982. All for naught apparently, since they're currently on tour as we speak. But Pete Townsend was certainly keeping busy, releasing his follow-up to the highly-acclaimed 1980 solo set, Empty Glass. Alas, the followup was not highly acclaimed. Nor acclaimed at all, come to think of it. 

Neither was the Who album released a few months later, solely to move product during the tour. It too failed to move the hearts of fans and critics, and failed to sustain the goodwill the band had earned the year prior with their first post-Keith Moon LP Face Dances. It didn't matter since The Who were "splitting up"(sic) and pulling in boatloads of cash on their not-final not-farewell 1982 tour of American football stadiums.

Artist: Elvis Costello & the Attractions

Album: Imperial Bedroom
Underwhelming follow-up to: Trust 

Trust might collapse under its own weight after "From a Whisper to a Scream" but only because it lapses into the Elvis-lite "mature" sound of this snoozer. But before it does so, Trust serves up some of Costello's biggest, brashest production numbers. The follow-up has none of those. 

There's nothing objectively wrong with Imperial Bedroom, other than it all reeks of Boomer faculty-lounge smarm. But the only song I really like on this album is "Beyond Belief," and even that's basically just a retread of "New Lace Sleeves" without the emotional drama.

Artist: The Go Go's

Album: Vacation
Underwhelming follow-up to: Beauty and the Beat 

You can't argue with the title track single, probably their best ever. But the Go's drinking and drugging was already taking a toll on the songwriting, which truth be told was never all that great to begin with. It sold about a quarter as many copies as their debut, but that's show business for you. 

Luckily, I didn't care since my only interest in this band was thinking Belinda Carlisle was the cutest damn thing on the planet and my punk princess dream. Back before her glam makeover when she was pudgy and adorable, I mean. And before you-know-who grabbed me by my soul forevermore a year later.

Artist: Devo

Album: Oh No, it's Devo!
Underwhelming follow-up to: New Traditionalists

Devo had been a band since the early 70s and were pretty much running on fumes by this point, creatively speaking. Worse, Oh No took the band on an express train straight to MIDI City, and it really sounds cheap, cringey and fake today, since nothing ages music as quickly as obsolete technology. 

The ugly truth is that Devo peaked with their first album (which seems to exist in a timeless parallel reality) and their songwriting capabilities faded with each subsequent release. Outside of the two singles - neither of which are deathless classics - Oh No, it's Devo! is unlistenable for anyone but hardcore fans.

Artist: The B-52s

Album: Mesopotamia
Underwhelming follow-up to: Wild Planet

I'm guessing having David Byrne produce The B-52s looked good on paper to somebody, but it doesn't sound very good on vinyl. Having one of Rock's most self-serious autists produce a bunch of ditzy goofballs is the proverbial chalk and cheese, a non-starter. At least that's what critics and the buying public all seemed to think. 

Chastened, the B's ditched all the arty crap and got back to their nutty, zany, whacky roots with Whammy! the following year. Most of the Mesopotamia cuts were heavily remixed and it appears the original EP has been deleted.

Artist: Billy Idol

Album: Billy Idol
Underwhelming follow-up to: Kiss Me Deadly

Generation X never got a fair shake, neither the demographic nor the English punk band. GenX should have done what Idol himself did later and relocate to America, seeing as how the Brits didn't realize the good thing they had.  Instead, KISS impresario and GenX manager Bill Aucoin cannily recreated Idol as a cartoon punk made safe for Middle America, just in time for the MTV explosion. England's loss, I reckon.

Look, I liked Vital Idol as much as anyone but always found Idol's actual albums a bit of a chore. All the more so the debut, which sounds a lot like a slickened up, watered-down late-period Generation X. If you haven't already, go check out Generation X. Great band. So absurdly underrated.

Artist: The Cure
Album: Pornography
Underwhelming follow-up to: Faith 

Growing as a cult phenomenon, The Cure released a double LP called Happily Ever After in late 1981, containing Seventeen Seconds and Faith in their entirety. But all was gothically unwell in the Cure camp, with the usual drugs and infighting about to send bassist Simon Gallup packing.

Pornography is by no means a bad album, it's just that it's depressive to the point of being oppressive, opening with the cheery dictum, "it doesn't matter if we all die." It's certainly more energetic than its predecessor but considerably less enjoyable, distinctly lacking in the memorable tune or riff department. The indisputable master of bipolar bop, Bob Smith followed up the album with the "Let's Go to Bed" single, which I absolutely loathed at the time.

Artist: Siouxsie & the Banshees

Album: Kiss in the Dreamhouse
Underwhelming follow-up to: Juju 

A Kiss in the Dreamhouse is a very good record and it's filled with a lot of Siouxsie standards. But it's lighter, poppier, Sixties Psych vibe makes it a disappointing followup to Juju, an absolutely iconic LP whose pounding post-punk scorchers set the template for thousands of gothic rock bands to follow. 

But given the witchy darkness and the flat-out psychotic lyrical content of Juju (example: "F*ck the mothers, kill the others/F*ck the others, kill the mothers"), it could well be the band needed to purge the taint from their systems.

This Banshees lineup is everyone's favorite, boasting the killer rhythm section of Budgie and Severin augmented by the non-Euclidean guitar virtuosity of the late, great John McGeoch.

Artist: XTC

Album: English Settlement
Underwhelming follow-up to: Black Sea 

English Settlement is a very good record as well, but like Dreamhouse, its pastoral folk-rock sound marked a considerable lightening and relaxation of Black Sea's hyperactive Cold War paranoia. It's very much a 1970s album, maybe like something Fairport Convention or Jethro Tull might do if they were feeling a bit arty.

Overall, I think the songs on Black Sea are far more memorable and iconic in aggregate than those on its follow-up. 'Senses Working Overtime' and 'Ball and Chain' are great singles, but I remember college radio playing at least half of Black Sea in very heavy rotation, a fate which this one never enjoyed. 

Artist: Killing Joke

Album: Revelations
Underwhelming follow-up to: What’s THIS For?

Same deal as Siouxsie and Juju: Killing Joke set the parameters for industrial metal with What's THIS for?, so much so that Ministry would basically remake it and retitle it The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. But the Jokers' prodigious drug use seems to have driven them insane, inspiring them to have a go at morphing into the evil twins of Adam and the Ants. Sadly, Conny Planck's anal-retentive sensibility and dry, sterile production robs the songs of the peaty Folk Horror ambiance they need to truly menace the unsuspecting listener. Still, I've come to like this album a lot more than I did back in 1982.

Singer Jaz Coleman and guitarist Geordie Walker famously took to Iceland after Revelations, telling the press they went there to sit out the Apocalypse. What they really went up to Iceland for was to take drugs and partake in "sex magick rituals" with lots of local Viking lasses.

Artist: Psychedelic Furs

Album: Forever Now
Underwhelming follow-up to:  Talk Talk Talk 

As one of the greatest post-punk albums of all time, Talk Talk Talk was a very tough act to follow. A lot of people seem to like Forever Now better, but for me it just didn't have the songwriting its predecessor did ("Pretty in Pink" shreds "Love my Way" any old time). The sound is a lot cleaner and more organized on Forever Now (the six-piece band seemed to be having a contest to see who could make the biggest racket on Talk), but it also has that overbearingly synthetic Todd Rundgren production I was already sick of by 1982.

Forever Now is perfectly fine for what it is, but for my money it's by far the least worthy of the Furs' classic first four.

Artist: The Jam

Album: The Gift
Underwhelming follow-up to: Sound Affects 

Paul Weller was already planning his exit at this point so he wasn't about to waste his best ideas on a Jam album. And it shows, believe you me. "A Town Called Malice" is a dead-bang classic, but it's just a remake of "You Can't Hurry Love," so it doesn't exactly qualify as an "idea." 

I always hated the way this album was produced too. I can't quite explain it, but it sounds like it was recorded in an aluminum box. It all sounds so cold and hollow, which naturally doesn't do the weak material any favors.

Artist: Gang of Four

Album: Songs fo the Free
Underwhelming follow-up to:  Solid Gold

Oh, don't get me started on Gang of Four. You wouldn't like me when I get started on Gang of Four.

So Go4 bassist Dave Allen had quit to form Shriekback with Barry Andrews. Sara Lee, who'd played with Andrews in Robert Fripp's League of Gentlemen, then replaced Allen. It was a poor choice. Lee is a fine musician, but Dave Allen is a force of nature and really lit a fire in this band. So Songs of the Free results, a very bland and inoffensive New Wave album, lacking any hammering Go4 nailbiters like "Ether" or "Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time."

"I Love a Man in Uniform" was the big club hit and it was considered as a theme song for Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign. True story.

Don't get me started on the follow-up to this album. I cannot be held responsible for my actions if you get me started on the follow-up to this album.

Artist: Bauhaus

Album: Sky’s Gone Out
Underwhelming follow-up to: Mask 

Bauhaus were really starting to build a following around this time, so naturally they started to fall apart. You could tell they were losing a bit of focus since the second half of the album (starting with "Spirit") starts to feel a lot more like Sheer Heart Attack/Night of the Opera Queen than Goth's great ghostly white hopes. It's all eminently listenable but after the 1-2-3 punch of their breathtaking cover of Eno's protopunk stormer, "Third Uncle", the quintessential Goth anthem "Silent Hedges" and the quasi-Metal scorcher "Into the Night", it all feels a bit bait-and-switch. 

It certainly confused me quite a bit when it was released.

Artist: King Crimson

Album: Beat
Underwhelming follow-up to: Discipline

Eighties Crim albums are pretty much of a piece in style and sound, and could easily all have come from the same sessions. However, Beat is the weakest of the three by my reckoning, and the one I listen to the least. You can get far superior versions of its three best cuts - "Heartbeat", "Satori in Tangier" and "Waiting Man"- on live albums, so why bother with it? No one else seems to.

Artist: Rush

Album: Signals
Underwhelming follow-up to: Moving Pictures

It wasn't an underwhelming follow-up to me, because I'm pretty sure I like Signals better than Moving Pictures, which I like quite a lot to begin with. But a lot of fans didn't care for Rush's continuing embrace of New Wave flavorings and Signals didn't move nearly as many units as did its predecessor. 

That said, I don't know a Rush fan today that doesn't clutch "Subdivisions" and "Analog Kid" tight to their bosom, so it all came out in the wash anyway.

Artist: Peter Gabriel

Album: Security
Underwhelming follow-up to: Melt 

This where the Bond villain arch-Globalist really started to lose me. Melt is the name fans have given to his third self-titled album; this was supposed to be the fourth self-titled album but his label made him slap a title on it. And Security's best cuts - the singles "Shock the Monkey" and "I Have the Touch" - barely measure up to Melt's worst. And most of the rest of Security is bogged down with turgid, meandering prog epics so listless, inert and boring they make Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" sound like Slayer.

The video for "Shock the Monkey" is fantastic, though.

Artist: Kate Bush

Album: The Dreaming
Underwhelming follow-up to: Never For Ever

Fresh off the success of Never for Ever -- her most fully-realized album so far -- Kate Bush discovered the dark, hammering joys of Killing Joke and Public Image Ltd, as well as the synthetic pleasures of the Fairlight sampler. Being Kate Bush (read: "mercurial and flaky") she decided her audience of mainstream art-rock and art-pop fans would be keen to hear her incorporate the pounding drums and atonal screeching of her new favorites into her own records. 

As it turns out, they weren't. In their droves.

I was keen, however, being quite the fan of KJ and PiL myself. There's also the fact that I thought she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen in my life, judging by The Dreaming's cover alone. Hey, I was young and it was the Eighties. I also never got that SNL appearance of hers out of my mind. Neither did the producers of The Fabulous Baker Boys.

Artist: Fleetwood Mac

Album: Mirage
Underwhelming follow-up to: Tusk

Tusk is seen as the underwhelming followup to Rumours by normies, but for my money it's the real jewel in the Fleetwood Mac crown. My buddy Gregg and I used to spark one up, pull out some comics and put Tusk on the turntable every day after school. It was then I was initiated into its true magic.

By contrast to Tusk, Mirage is just a solid slab of pop craftsmanship, constructed by seasoned pros. But most of the album seems to have the same beat and tempo, like Mick Fleetwood was only available for a single session. And Mirage lacks anything with the heart-melting beauty of songs like "Sara," "Save Me a Place," "Honey Hi,""Brown Eyes," "Beautiful Child," and "Walk a Thin Line." 

Seriously: go listen to Tusk. It's so intimate and sensuous it's like having a foursome with them, in their 70s prime.

So, see what I mean? Disappointment was what music was all about in 1982. More to come, so stay tuned.