11. Love and Rockets, Earth, Sun, Moon (1987)

“After the last tour, which was forty-five dates and a long tour by our standards, we made a decision to make a more acoustic-sounding album and get away from the rock ‘n’ roll circus,” David Ash, the frontman of Love and Rockets, told a reporter shortly after the release of the band’s third studio album, Earth, Sun, Moon. “So we went to a studio that didn’t have a lot of technology and just did a bunch of songs on acoustic guitar. We even used cardboard boxes for drums in places.”

Express was the album that caused the band to embark on that lengthy jaunt from one music club to another. A significant success on the U.S. album chart, Express was almost entirely ignored in Love and Rockets’ U.K. homeland, a common problem that persisted across their career. (“Well, we weren’t even acknowledged in England as being a band,” Ash said many years later. “There’s a story about the record company, Martin Mills told me at Beggars Banquet that they re-released ‘So Alive’ as a single in England three times, and it sold a grand total of 600 copies. Whereas in America, it went to #3. It’s like Prince was #1, Madonna was #2, and “So Alive” was #3 in 1989. That’s something I’ll never forget. And in England we had nothing, no interest at all.”) The favor heaped on Express only fortified the tendency of the trio — Ash, bassist and vocalist David J, and drummer and synthesizer player Kevin Haskins — to reinvent themselves with every new record. Fans who warmed to the bold, buzzy pop songs of earlier releases wouldn’t be pandered to when it came to new offerings.

To craft the material for Earth, Sun, Moon, Love and Rockets settled back into their hometown of Northampton, a town in Central England that was relatively modest, at least compared to the European urban centers where most of their musical contemporaries set up shop. Whether by luck or strategy, the blunting of both hustle and bustle that occurred in the community further inspired the band to follow their instincts and make music that spun away from what they’d done before.

“We tend to think that if we moved to a big city or to a place where the sun shines a lot, we’d probably get distracted and probably get very laid-back,” Haskins said at the time. “In London or New York or Los Angeles, there are different fads and fashions in music. We don’t tend to get influenced by them or corrupted by them. I think it just helps us to be more individual and out on a limb.”

Cannily, Earth, Sun, Moon doesn’t announce itself as a radical departure from the moment the needle finds the first note. Album opener “Mirror People” is grinding, danceable goth rock that wouldn’t sound out of place on either of Love and Rockets’ previous albums. The song’s lyrics are vaguely about teenage vanity, and there are plenty of lines designed for defiantly morose listeners to grab ahold of like a saddle horn: “Because I could be nothing at all/ Because I should be nothing at all/ I wish I could be nothing at all/ I wish I could be nothing at all.” The established norm erodes just a bit on the second cut, “The Light,” which is a dollop of gorgeous, swirling gloom (“And do you recall/ When you fall/ I can’t help notice/ No light in our eyes”), and then the process of easing into the transformation goes further with the echoing hollow of “Welcome Tomorrow,” its thrumming resonance marked by bomb-burst drum strikes.

It’s highly satisfying that the first entrant on the track list that markedly deviates from expectation also wound up as the first mainstream hit of Love and Rockets’ career. “No New Tale to Tell” is like vintage folk rock yanked forcibly into the pop sensibility of the nineteen-eighties. It has a vibrant melody, a soaring, singalong chorus, and lyrics of irresistible faux profundity (“You cannot go against nature/ Because when you do/ Go against nature/ It’s part of nature too”). It just feels like a hit. Although it astoundingly never cracked the Billboard Hot 100, it made headway on rock radio, was in heavy rotation on MTV, and was an absolute smash with student programmers on the left end of the dial.

The remainder of the album largely stays in the same mode, demonstrating the range of what could be done with spare, slick instrumentation. “Waiting for the Flood” reaches back to classic David Bowie songs, “Lazy” moves in a haze of strutting nineteen-seventies glam rock, and “The Telephone Is Empty” has an appealing psychedelic groove. “Rain Bird,” which David J wrote in response to Ash’s rumblings about exiting the band (“Like a stranded insect/ Stuck in a bowl of glue/ He tries to fly/ But he will die/ If he ever leaves the zoo”) has a lilting pop ingenuity that recalls XTC. The title cut is downright luxuriant in its gentleness and simplicity.

The airiness of the music sometimes disguises the cultivated misery within the songs. To a degree, the inner sourness stands as the clearest connection Love and Rockets’ foundational creativity identity (including, of course, the threesome’s tenure together in legendary goth rock band Bauhaus). That grim mood is also a reflection of the mindset that Love and Rockets believed was integral to their art.

“To write music and songs and such, you have to some sort of inspiration,” Ash explained as Earth, Sun, Moon climbed the charts. “And usually inspiration doesn’t come from being in a good mood. It comes from not feeling good. It comes from feeling confused or some anxiety about something.”

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.