32. The Cure, The Head on the Door (1985)

It seemed the Cure were at an end. Post-punk upstarts on their 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys, the band rapidly evolved into trailblazers of goth rock on subsequent albums. That process reached its apex with the gorgeously gloomy Pornography, released in 1982. At the conclusion of the tour in support of that album, bassist Simon Gallup quite the band, largely due to the deterioration of his relationship with frontman Robert Smith. The next few years found Smith wandering. He signed on to play guitar in Siouxsie and the Banshees and pursued a side project called the Glove. There was officially a new album credited to the Cure in 1984, but that release, titled The Top, was widely understood to be a Smith solo outing in disguise.

Although the band enjoyed some significant critical and commercial successes during this era with a string of singles, including “Let’s Go to Bed,” “The Walk,” and “The Lovecats,” Smith was at his core unsatisfied. He wasn’t engaged by the different session musicians and other collaborators cycling through the band for studio sessions or live dates. Whether Smith was totally prepared to admit it at the time, Gallup was one of the collaborators who he valued most, who he trusted as a sounding board when setting the appropriate artistic direction of the band. With a little help from the Cure roading Gary Biddles and a few pints of beer, Smith and Gallups reconciled and recommitted to their creative partnership.

“The actual decision for me to go and meet Simon and ask him to rejoin the group was the most positive thing I’d done for ages with regards to the Cure,” Smith said some years later. “Once he’d agreed, I knew I could pick up where I left off with Pornography.”

Picking up where they left off wasn’t the same as attempting to duplicate the fundamental style of the earlier album. Smith’s instincts had already been guiding him in a more pop-friendly direction, sometimes to his own chagrin. He gave into those instincts almost entirely for The Head on the Door, the Cure’s sixth studio album. In the roundelay of promotion for the album, Smith sometimes acknowledged the record’s added mainstream appeal and sometimes downplayed it. Probably the most accurate assessment he provided was that the songs were “more accomplished, rather than more accessible,” a natural outcome for an act that had already logged a lot of time on the rock circuit.

“They’re still very simple, but I think my sense of tune has gotten more refined as the years have gone by,” Smith added in the same interview. “I don’t rely on the same chords anymore.”

On The Head on the Door, Smith specifically strove to introduce more variety, citing Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Kaleidoscope and the Human League’s Dare as influences. That’s approach is occasionally quite evident, as when the flamenco guitar parts or mystical flairs burble up in “The Blood” or an atypically funky groove takes over “Screw.” Mainly, the album is thrilling for the evidence of everyone involved simply locking on the inventive pop mastery that would essentially define the Cure from there on it, notably on immediate college radio staples “In Between Days” and “Close to Me,” which are both crisp and irresistible.

Smith’s observation about added refinement is also backed up by the cuts on the album. “Kyoto Song” is intricate in its construction and playing, and “Push” manages to be both lithe and epic. The newfound vibrancy to the Cure’s music allows the band to skirt the self-parody that goth bands are always deeply susceptible to. In the lyrics, they are often as dour as ever, but the material sounds so heavenly. If “A Night Like This” wallows plenty (“Please stay/ But I watch you like I’m made of stone/ As you walk away”), it also allows space for strident, self-empowering hope (“I’m coming to find you if it takes me all night/ Can’t stand here like this anymore/ For always and ever is always for you/ I want it to be perfect like before”). The elegance of the songcraft helps the latter tone to prevail.

As assuredly as the Cure train was roaring down this new track, the conductor still had his misgivings. Smith still wasn’t entirely sure the bolder, brighter version of the band’s material was entirely to his liking. At the very least, The Head on the Door hadn’t supplanted earlier Cure records in his affections, even as he realized other fans were likely to feel differently.

“It’s not as close to my heart as Pornography, but people will probably find it easier to listen to, and probably find it a better record,” Smith said at the time.

31. Lou Reed, New Sensations (1984)

“I want to be a rock ‘n’ roll Kurt Weill,” Lou Reed said as he toured in support of New Sensations, his thirteenth studio album as a solo artist. “My interest — all the way back with the Velvets — has been one really simple idea: Take rock ‘n’ roll, the pop format, and make it for adults, with subject matter for adults, and written so that an adult, like myself, could listen to it.”

Whether others would have alit upon the comparison to the composer famed for his contributions to The Threepenny Opera, a consensus had hardened by the middle of the nineteen-eighties that Reed was indeed a unique songwriter in his chosen milieu. A street poet whose songs often were packed with bleak details that hit like tire jacks swung in fury, the reductive appraisal of Reed settled on him as a grandee of the grim. That reputation fed into the critical reaction of New Sensations, which almost uniformly deemed it Reed’s happy album. Certainly, the spectacularly bouncy, catchy opening track and first single, “I Love You, Suzanne,” offers pretty compelling corroborating testimony. Actually, Reed did, too.

“I want to get funkier, more danceable,” Reed insisted to The Los Angeles Times. “That’s what I’m interested in now. You know how I’d like to hear my stuff? I’d like to walk into my local pub and hear it blaring out on the jukebox with nobody listening to the words at all.”

The notion of anyone gliding past the lyrics of a Reed song is fairly absurd, though it might have done him a favor if the rich, bluesy guitar riffs of “My Red Joystick” caused anyone within speakershot to lose track of the single-entendre goofing of the words: “You can keep the color TV, those soaps just make me sick/ All I’m asking you leave me is my little red joystick.” There is definitely a sense that Reed is questing after his goal of a semi-engaged barroom crowd in satisfying fashion on the lean, leathery, and yet oddly gospel-tinged “Turn to Me” and the sprightly title cut. “What Become a Legend Most” has a prickly theatricality that makes that Weill aspiration start to seem well met, too.

Reed, though, is foremost a storyteller, and that continuously comes through on New Sensations. “Doin’ the Things That We Want To” inspired by seeing Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love in its original Broadway run and includes a straightforward raves about Martin Scorsese’s cinematic artistry: “It reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York/ Those frank and brutal movies that are so brilliant.” Reed circles back to his own creative reportage about his metropolitan home on “High in the City,” which adopts a little reggae lope as it offers an ode to New York City that acknowledges its pervasive dangers (“I got my mace and you got your knife/ You gotta protect your own life”) but ultimately operates in a cheerful mode (“Don’t want to talk politics today/ I feel too good let me have my way”).

New Sensations is Reed at his loosest and, by extension, messiest. The songs seem to be generated from reactions to the plainest encounters of his average day. If that’s the case, it would definitely explain the repeat of video game imagery on album closer “Down at the Arcade” (“It’s very dangerous/ Putting money down on Robotron/ Oh, I’m the Great Defender/ And I really know just how to get along”). Of course, that conclusion betrays a faulty view of how Reed operates as a songwriter. As a case in point, “My Friend George” finds Reed’s reminiscing about a childhood friend with unadorned nostalgia: “I knew George since he’s eight/ I always thought that he was great/ And anything that George would do/ You know that I would do it too.” The song’s wistful qualities are directly countered that it was reading a newspaper story about a murder by sword and wondering if his was his bygone pal who did the felonious deed. Projecting actual autobiography onto the song is a sucker’s game.

“That’s my favorite song on that album,” said of “My Friend George” a couple years later. ina Rolling Stone interview. “I remember that when we were recording it, the engineer turned to me and said, ‘Do you have a friend named George?’ And I said, ‘Of course not.’ One of the nice things about being a writer is that you can have a friend named George.”

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.