DEEP CUTS
Three records that don't sound like 1989
The mainstream version of 1989 is hair metal and pop production so compressed it sounds like it was recorded inside a sneaker. These three records exist in a parallel universe from the same year.
The mainstream version of 1989 is hair metal and pop production so compressed it sounds like it was recorded inside a sneaker. Power ballads. Big drums. Keymasters of everything. If you only knew the Billboard charts, you’d think the year was a creative holding pattern between one era and whatever came next.
And then there were these three records.
Disintegration, The Cure
Robert Smith spent most of the eighties being misread as a purveyor of misery and eyeliner, which missed the point by about half. Disintegration is the record that settled the argument - not by abandoning the darkness but by making it so musically rich that you couldn’t reduce it to a mood. The guitars here are textural in ways that hadn’t really been done in rock music; they function more like keyboards, building atmosphere rather than carrying riffs. “Lovesong” is the radio hit, and it’s genuinely one of the most beautiful pop songs of the decade. But “Plainsong,” which opens the record, is the statement of intent - eight minutes of slowly building orchestration that announces a band playing at a completely different scale than anyone around them.
This is what patient, unhurried music making sounds like when it works. The record is long and it earns every minute.
Doolittle, Pixies
The Pixies had exactly one move - loud/quiet/loud, distortion as dynamics, Black Francis screaming over something that could almost be a pop song - and they executed it so precisely and with such economy that it never felt like a formula. Doolittle is the peak of it. “Debaser,” “Gouge Away,” “Hey” - each one a miniature that does its work in three minutes and gets out. Kim Deal’s bass is doing something different from what everyone else is doing, and the interplay between her and Francis creates a tension that most bands spend whole albums trying to find.
The record influenced everything that came after it in alternative rock, which means most listeners encountered the influence before the source. Go back to the source. The songs hit differently when you’re not hearing them through twenty years of derivation.
Technique, New Order
New Order spent the eighties making dance music for people who claimed not to like dance music, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Technique is the most fully realized version of that project - recorded in Ibiza during the early acid house explosion, and it shows. The record has a looseness that the more meticulous Power, Corruption and Lies didn’t, and a warmth that the electronic components in their earlier work sometimes suppressed. “Fine Time” is absurdist and euphoric simultaneously. “Run” is as close to a perfect pop song as the band ever made. “Dream Attack” closes the record on a note that sounds like both an ending and an opening.
Dance music and rock music were supposed to be separate things in 1989. New Order kept not getting the memo.
Three records, three genres, one year. None of them sound like what was supposed to be happening. All three sound like they were made by people who knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t particularly care what anyone else was doing at the time.
That’s usually how the good ones get made.