Like on The Snow Goose (1975), the group worked not only with music but with a storyline. Nude tells the well known story of the Japanese man who fought in World War II and was accidentally left stranded on an island somewhere in the Pacific, much like Robinson Crusoe. A couple of decades went by with him living in solitude, thinking that the war was still raging. Eventually, he was found and brought back to civilization which had undergone major changes during his absence. Nude tries to live in this new world, but ultimately decides that it is too much for him, packs up his things and sets sail to return to his island home.
This story is accompanied by some of the most beautiful soft rock music that Camel ever composed. Once again, I found myself getting excited about an album that has no weak tracks. There seems to be no shortage of those, even now that progressive rock's golden age has gone and this album isn't particularly proggy either. Also, an album of this caliber coming out in January made it feel like the search for the best album of the year was already over. But let's see what else will be coming out.
Some more city life is depicted in the video embedded above. At the end of the very same month, on 30 January the new Rush album Moving Pictures came out. The video above has been made afterwards by a fan of The Camera Eye which is perhaps my favorite track on the album. This is not an easy choice: the new release is full of brilliant hard rock songs, the best known of which must, I guess, be the single release Tom Sawyer.
So, even though I still wouldn't have classified Rush as prog, I had nonetheless grown to like their music a lot. As great as last year's Permanent Waves was (and, in part, also two previous albums A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres), this new release was my new number one favorite. Still, I don't think Moving Pictures quite compared with Nude. Also, there is one weak track on it, namely the very last song Vital Signs which doesn't amount to much. Otherwise, a really fine rock album.
9 February marked the moment when the final nails in the coffin of Genesis were hammered in. Phil Collins released his first solo album Face Value, which became a huge success and thus gave Phil concrete proof that this was how the Genesis albums should also sound like from this point onward. And, for a large part, they did. Horn sections, funky rhythms and lyrics about the difficulty of human relationships. Oh, crap. Facepalm d'Or.
However, had Face Value been a worthless album, it wouldn't be mentioned here at all, so let's give a little credit where credit's due. First of all, In the Air Tonight is a really powerful pop song, there is no denying it. One of the year's best in that category. Second, Phil's cover of Tomorrow Never Knows, originally by The Beatles, is a real standout. And there are a couple of other tracks that work really well, like the searingly honest ballad The Roof is Leaking, and the wild instrumental Droned that follows it. Everything else, in particular all songs with horn arrangements, was tolerable at best and outrageously bad at worst.
In March, nothing of any importance came out. Let's fill that void by discussing one 1981 album whose release date I have no idea of. Some time during this year, The Flying Lizards released an album called Fourth Wall that sounded exciting to me overall, and contained not one but two absolutely brilliant tracks that I needed to embed here, and just did. Please check them both out above.
I felt I had to make an exception to the rule of only one song per album because in my mind these two tracks belong together; they follow one another on the album; and I don't think I have ever listened to one without listening to the other. In My Lifetime has a really nice video too, while the instrumental Cirrus is accompanied by the album cover only. The Flying Lizards was a British group of experimental musicians, led by record producer David Cunningham. Fourth Wall was their second album following the self titled debut that came out the previous year. I heard nothing more of them since, but these two tracks really work.
10 April, and I found myself listening to post punk, once again. Actual punk never rose very high on my year's best lists, but it seems that it spawned all kinds of interesting new artists. Public Image Ltd. is of course what became of John Lydon of Sex Pistols fame: a decidedly anti-commercial group that started recording almost immediately following the disbanding of Pistols.
The Flowers of Romance was their third album and its strong opening track gave me more than enough reason to start following their output closely. Four Enclosed Walls, embedded above, is reputedly based on Lydon's experience of getting jailed for one night. It successfully encompasses the listener with a similar feeling of claustrophobia that Lydon apparently suffered. Not very much melody, but strong percussion and even stronger atmosphere.
The next album we will discuss is called Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports. Judged by its title alone, it could be mistaken for a solo album by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, but that's something it really isn't. By far the least talented member of that group, Mason couldn't even play drums particularly well, which is the only thing he does on this album. All songs were written by jazz artist Carla Bley, all but one of them were sung by progressive rock cult favorite Robert Wyatt, and there is even an excellent guitarist called Chris Spedding who is also more noteworthy than Mason, when it comes to this album.
Out on 3 May, the album contains two very fine tracks, one of them Hot River which has been embedded above. It closes the vinyl version's A side; I would also give a strong recommendation to the last track of B side called I'm a Mineralist, also easy to find in YouTube. Whereas Hot River is a pretty straightforward prog song, I'm a Mineralist also contains some enjoyable jazz passages. If you can tolerate those, you may be in for a real treat.
Less than two weeks later, on 15 May, The Moody Blues released their new album called Long Distance Voyager. By now, the group was way past their prime, but paradoxically, it wasn't until now that they published two of their greatest songs. Oh yes, unmissable tracks of the year, both of them. One of them was the brilliant album opener The Voice. The other, the B side opener Meanwhile has been embedded above, and there is even a fan made video to boot.
Together with I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band), in my opinion, they comprise the top three Moody Blues songs. A funny coincidence is that, while Nick Mason placed his best songs as the last tracks on both sides of his Fictitious Sports less than two weeks earlier, Moody Blues placed them as the first ones. And, this was also the last album that was released while I was still under age. Only six days following the release, on 21 May, I turned eighteen! I had finally become a responsible adult!
To celebrate that, let's embed Magnetic Fields Part 1, by Jean-Michel Jarre. It opens Jarre's third album Magnetic Fields that also came out in May 1981, but I don't know the date. Possibly before my birthday. The opening represents the absolute best in electronic music of the time, but later on, the quality of the album begins to deteriorate, with only the first two parts worth a listen. Even this first part feels a bit prolonged in the middle, although the first minutes are great and the last ones very good too.
Before we get to the only important release that is certain to have come out in June, let's once again discuss a couple of albums whose precise release dates are unknown to me. With any luck, maybe they were May or June releases and therefore close to their correct location in the blog.
First up is Klaus Nomi with his self titled debut album that contains an immensely beautiful version of Henry Purcell's (of A Clockwork Orange fame) composition, The Cold Song. Nomi was discovered by none other than David Bowie himself, and was sadly one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS only two years later, in August 1983. But at this time, the German singer was simply a new and exciting talent to emerge. I liked his next album, out in 1982, even better.
Next, we finally get to Rupert Hine. The British songwriter and producer had already written some music in the mid-seventies, but for some reason his peak era occurred between 1981 and 1983. His new solo album Immunity was the first masterpiece in the series. Please do check out the whole album and not only its stunning opening track, embedded below. We will come back to Hine in the very next blog entry, as the producer of one of this year's finest albums. An additional two good solo albums will follow in 1982 and 1983.
Let us then close this blog entry with an important single release. Kate Bush had already disappointed me with her third album Never for Ever in 1980. On 21 June she released a new single that would be later included on her fourth album. The album did not appear, however, until over a year later. Let's get back to it then and while waiting, let's listen to the outlandish Sat in Your Lap that makes the idea of Kate's fourth album truly appealing.
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