Daveportivo's Cultural Evaluation Facility

Have you ever felt like you've arrived late at a party? Come on you know the feeling you get there around Midnight absolutely sober you see your mates and they're all so far gone you have no hope of catching up and end up spending most the night listening to drunken ramblings and making sure everyone gets home safely. That's kind of what it's like trying to get into the Fall. I was born in 1987 two years after this record was released, by the time that I started rooting around and broadening my horizons (2001), I always found the Fall impentrable, everyone who likes the Fall loves them like God's, they worship them, they tell you everything's great, all of their albums get four and five star reviews. So after a long struggle you start to get used to the sound and uncover their masterworks and This Nation's Saving Grace is the greatest Fall album. It's the perfect combination of lo-fi indy production with menacing distorted guitars, Mark E. Smiths ranting and some gorgeously bouncy guitar hooks, best demostrated on Barmy. A gruff exterior to a funky and franetic album, as Smith warns at the outset you "Shall feel the wrath of my Bombast", he ain't kidding.

I'm sure I must have mentioned this at least ten times in the 80s singles list but I love 80s hip hop and miss it soarly, it was either deadly serious (Public Enemy, NWA) or a lot of fun (Slick Rick) and there was the glorious middle ground occupied by De la Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. However De La Soul are a little different from Tribe, while they both have incredible swagger, their flow is a joy to listen to, their cadence and timing is sublime but De La Soul was something new. 3 Feet High And Rising was the first rap album that you could dance to, this was a dance record, sure you have to pay attention to the words, but these are big grooves being laid down, this is music to shake your arse to and that can be dropped in clubs. Only last year I saw a DJ throw Me, Myself And I in the mix. Sure it's standard fare today, with fiddy and Kanye waging wars across the dancefloors of the nation and losing hands down to Dizzee Rascal, but in '89 this was untrodden water. Public Enemy, NWA, Tribe and DMC are impossible to dance to, but 3 Feet High was positively irresitible, hell we should of known from the James Brown-arific Change In Speak. As important and influencial as any hip hop record.

Now there's always a contention when you put a U2 album in any list, and rightly so, their importance (or is that self-importance) often out weighs the quality of their work. Utter garbage like How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, four songs surrounded by filler, wins an untold numbers of grammy's for no discernable reason, it's so easy to hate them, they're such easy targets. Yet we must not fall into the same trap, just as they are lavished with praise for no real reason, we mustn't hypocritically deny them genuine praise out of spite. War is my favorite U2 album, it's as hit and miss and incomplete as any U2 work, but what War has going for it more than any other U2 album is immediacy and passion. When the imfamous drum loop from Sunday Bloody Sunday kicks in the record has grabbed you by the balls, Bono has passion and for once he has something exciting to be passionate about. This is ultiamtely my favorite incarnation of U2, War is low fi, it rocks hard, its urgent, but it still has widescreen intent, Bono is still aiming for the stadiums and shooting for your hearts but its' not over bearing this is the sound of the balence being perfectly struck, hell it even has the perfect album artwork. I want to hate it but how could I hate the record that brought us New Years Day? I just can't, I fucking love it.

So by 1981 Kraftwerk had made their mark, they had turned the entire music world on its head and had pointed us forward into a scary emotionless future, of robotic electronic music. I wonder if Kraftwerk look at Daft Punk and The Knife and nod their heads with pride. Who knows, in fact I'm pretty sure they don't care one little bit, they are Kraftwerk after all, they don't have to care, they are arguably the single most innovative and important band in rock and roll history. Computer World is percieved (an correctly so) as their last record that was ahead of the curve, the eighties would see the world catch up, and take over as Kraftwerk difted off into isolation. Perhaps knowing there job was done they decided to go start the eighties with a playful record. It's so warm hearted, sure there's no humanity in these beats, it's still robotic, but it's not cold, its warm, it's robots who want to boogeey. Just listen to Pocket Calculator and try not to laugh and smile as Ralf in his wonderfully German accent says "I'm The operator with my pocket calculator" it's said with just the right amount of a knowing tone to difuse it's own ludricousness (is that a word?). That's what this album is, Kraftwerk with a wink and a nod, hell this album even spawned Coldplay's funnest song (Talk), silly Ralf-bot even got Chris Martin to lighten up what more can you ask for?

Now this album will always be a contentious choice, I honestly don't know why because it's bloody brilliant, but when it comes to New Order and this album, you're always going to start a debate. Why you ask? Well you see Joy Division fans always have something up their arses when it comes to New Order, claiming they took the Joy Division grooves and riffs and gave them a shining gleam and threw them back out there. Well this is more or less true, mostly less, really aside from Age Of Consent and Hooky's bass lines this is a major departure. Power, Corruption & Lies is a goregeous album, from the afore mention opener through the powerful heart wrenching balladry of We All Stand to the fun dance floor groove of 6 & 8 you can hear their influence on the careers of both Hot Chip and Franz Ferdinand in that single track alone. Then of course there's Your Silent Face and by this point when your hearing the dominance of soaring synths and slinky like bass slaps you start to wonder what on earth all those Joy Division fans get so peaved about? Power, Corruption & Lies, of the four classics, remains the best New Order album and that my friends is no mean feat.