36. R.E.M., Murmur (1983)

I.R.S. Records was keen to have a full-length R.E.M. studio effort to peddle. The Georgia band’s debut EP, Chronic Town, had been a hit, at least on college radio. Label representatives were confident enough in the commercial prospects for a long-player that they were willing to spring for up-and-coming British producer Stephen Hague. That Hague would soon go on to preside over records from the likes of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Pet Shop Boys, and Erasure is probably indication enough that he wasn’t suited to the task of working with these earnest adherents to a more lo-fi aesthetic. R.E.M. came in ready. They knew what songs they wanted to lay down and had a good sense of of the final track list. They almost immediately started chafing against Hague’s approach of multiple takes in search of a pristine version of the tracks. When Hague returned from an out-of-town mixing session with a version of one of the band’s songs that had a slick keyboard part added to it, that was it.

R.E.M. went back to label and asked to replace Hague with Mitch Easter, who’d produced the entirety of the band’s modest output to that point. There was initial reluctance, presumably because they could envision sales numbers dropping with the new wave–influenced pop sheen that was increasingly perceived as a necessity for chart success in the nineteen-eighties. I.R.S. Records insisted on a sort of try-out session. The band returned with “Pilgrimage,” a spooky, slyly propulsive track that stayed built on what they’d done before by bringing a little more weight and polish to it. It chugs along and insinuates itself, adding a twisty digression on its fleeting bridge. Satisfied by what they heard, I.R.S. okayed Easter, and Easter brought along his studio cohort Don Dixon as official co-producer. Together, they helped R.E.M. make their debut album, Murmur.

Rather than settling into Drive-In Studio, Easter’s usual home base recording space, all involved did feel like R.E.M. would benefit from more decked-out confines. They headed to Reflection Studios, in Charlotte, North Carolina, a production space that was mainly used by the suspect televangelist empire of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, whose Praise the Lord grift factory was headquarters right down the road. The location delivered an unexpected fringe benefit to Michael Stipe, lead singer of R.E.M., who walked away with a box crammed full of PTL swag, including a signed copy of Tammy Faye Bakker’s album Run Toward the Roar. More importantly, R.E.M. were in a place that had the resources to make exemplary recordings with technicians who were committed to letting them be themselves. Stipe even recorded most of his vocals in a darkened stairwell just outside of the proper studio space.

“I was not about to go in and say, ‘Oh, Michael, I can’t quite understand your line about the placenta falling off the end of your bed,'” Dixon noted to Rolling Stone several years later. “We were dealing with a fragile sort of art concept and trying to bring in a little pop sensibility without beating it up.”

In the same Rolling Stone write-up, which coincided with the publication declaring Murmur to be one of the ten best albums of the nineteen-eighties, guitarist Peter Buck insisted the band was deliberately trying to create music that was unorthodox, at least for that moment. That washow they’d remain true to themselves.

“We were conscious that we were making a record that really wasn’t in step with the times,” Buck said. “It was an old-fashioned record that didn’t sound too much like what you heard on the radio.”

None of this means that the Murmur is some wispy, precious things that threatens to drift off into the ether. There are certainly passages where the album delivers the subtler volume implied by its title, such as the achingly tender “Perfect Circle” and potent ballad “Talk About the Passion.” In its throbbing heart, Murmur is a right and true rock ‘n’ roll album. It’s no accident that R.E.M. opens with a fresh take on “Radio Free Europe,” the song that served as their first single. Bill Berry’s hits the introductory drum beat with firecracker sharpness before the cuts careens along, its melody like bending like a mountain road that prompts a mild flash of vertigo. Driven by a funky, intricate bass line by Mike Mills, “Laughing” is a bristly wonder, and “Moral Kiosk” betrays the Gang of Four influence R.E.M. often professed to but that early music writers rarely noticed.

Much as Murmur is celebrated, particularly retroactively, as an example of a band arriving fully formed on their debut, R.E.M. is clearly still experimenting. The ragged, elusive “9-9” and gently jaunty “We Walk” stray into odd territory for the band. Their sound was so resonant and distinctive that it suggested more cohesion than was actually present across these first two longer sides. Resolutely egalitarian in their collaboration, the four bandmates were still making it up as they went along.

“There’s no creative process,” Stipe explained not long after the album’s release. “It’s like making mud pies. We throw things at one another.”

Plenty of those mud pies were so enticing that the band kept returning to their basic sonic shape. Probing number “Catapult” and jangly charmer “Sitting Still,” probably more than any other cuts on the album, set the template for the near future of R.E.M., not to mention the countless acts that borrowed from them in an attempt to ingratiate themselves to college radio programmers in the next few years. Like R.E.M., college radio was very much finding its footing at this time. Murmur is a masterful album that was transformative for the programming on the left end of the dial.

35. Sinéad O’Connor, The Lion and the Cobra (1987)

Sinéad O’Connor was fourteen years old when she wrote her first song, titled “Take My Hand.” As with many situations in O’Connor’s life, the circumstances surrounding the art were rough. The song was inspired by a punishment exacted on her that entailed a night spent huddled on the cold floor of the Irish reformatory boarding school where she was sent after being expelled from several other institutions. With a vague religious weight, it tells of a man drifting into the hereafter; “You have done all you can/ Live no more/ Sigh as you walk through the door.” Around the same time, O’Connor was regularly sneaking out the school to participate in local singing competitions, where she claimed she could always take a least a portion of the prize pot by singing Evita showstopper “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” One of her teachers, likely hoping to use O’Connor’s interest in music to divert her away from miscreant instincts, introduced her to drummer Paul Byrne, who had recently helped found a band called In Tua Nua. He recognized O’Connor’s talent straightaway and brought her into the fold. The other members of In Tua Nua helped O’Connor flesh out the song, and they all recorded a demo version of it. Any thoughts that O’Connor might become permanent member of the group were undone by her age, which would have been a major impediment to touring. Leslie Dowdall was brought in to handle lead vocal duties instead.

“They kept the song, which was called ‘Take My Hand,’ but said I was too young to be their singer,” O’Conner wrote in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings. “I was so jealous of the girl who got the job that at first I wanted to cry when I heard her sing my words.”

Although she was kept off the official roster on In Tua Nua, O’Connor had knocked open an entryway into the music business. She kept impressing people with her powerhouse voice and making connections that led straight to her being signed by Ensign Records while still in her teens. Those circles also snared O’Connor the plum assignment of singing lead on “Heroine,” a track that appeared on the soundtrack for the Irish film Captive, which U2 guitarist the Edge helped score as a side project. When that song was released, many journalists and fans assumed O’Connor had been discovered by U2. Instead, she was already midway through the recording of her debut album at that point, and it wasn’t going well.

“People have preconceptions about the record, about me,” O’Connor told the Associated Press after her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released. “They hear I’m an Irish woman and right away they think I’m dramatic and hysterical. I’m not. The idea that all Irish women are all romantic and fiery and all Irish men are rogues is just plain rubbish.”

Those preconceptions extended to the first producer assigned to O’Connor. He kept trying to add a mist of Irish mysticism to the O’Connor’s songs. Her initial wariness soon evolved into complete distrust and misery. Eventually, she raised her concerns with the music executives shepherding her first album to completion, and they relented to her request to completely take over. The producer was given his walking papers, and O’Connor was allowed to scrap the previous sessions and start over, producing herself. The result is a vibrant, vivacious album that announces a startling, unique talent. The Lion and Cobra sounds like nothing that came before and damn few albums that came since.

The album opens with “Jackie,” which seethes as it builds to contained, unstoppable power. It’s recalls a pop song less than some unsettling organism that looms like a threat in a David Cronenberg cinematic shocker. It gives way to the thumping “Mandinka,” which alternates between intoxicating defiance (“I don’t know no shame/ I feel no pain”) and a sweetness (“I swear I do/ Soon I can give you my heart”) that creates its own disorientation. Two tracks deep, it already feels like O’Connor can achieve absolutely anything in the grooves of a record.

The remainder of The Lion and the Cobra only reinforced that first (and second) impression. “Jerusalem” demonstrates a hip hop influence, and “Troy” is quietly epic. “I Want Your (Hands on Me)” draw from global tones and dance club workouts to become a runaway train of rhythmic desire. The spare, spectral ballad “Drink Before the War” features vocals so intense that they almost seem like an act of sorcery. If O’Connor had no discernible antecedents, her uncompromising, unapologetic authority on the record surely influenced artists who followed. In one clear example, “Just Like U Said It Would B” lays the groundwork for the lean, intense manner of early PJ Harvey albums. The whole album comes across as a watershed moment.

The challenge of such uniqueness is that the businesspeople charged with ferrying the album to the public are likely to be perplexed by it, a situation that was compounded by Ensign being sold off to Chrysalis Records before The Lion and the Cobra was released. Both labels tried to shape O’Connor’s image to suit the perceived preferences of MTV. As with every other form. of external control she’d encountered to that point, O’Connor’s response was angry rebellion, most famous manifesting in her shaving her head rather than acquiescing to some sort of pop princess makeover. The act of spite against the businesspeople proved to be a brilliant PR move; every last article marveled over the desolate landscape of her noggin. O’Connor also came to believe that dichotomy between her look, which was mostly associated with punk rock at the time, and her art

“Cutting my hair turned out to serve a very useful purpose,” she told Spin. “I think it’s good that there is a shocking element to the way I look. People expect to hear one thing, and what they do hear is completely different.”

Those people liked what they heard, too. Whatever nervousness Chrysalis marketers felt about O’Connor, she came across as a bonafide star, and the excellence of the album was self-evident. The Lion and the Cobra did so well in the marketplace that within just a few months of its release, Chrysalis Records president Mike Bone had to pay up on a promise he made to O’Connor that she could shave his head to make it match hers if the album moved more than fifty thousand units in the U.S. By the time the razor met his dome, the album had surpassed that sales threshold threefold on its way to earning gold record status.

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.