Siouxsie and the Banshees
The 50 Best Albums of 1982
Looking back at 1982 in music, the headline is obvious: Thriller Sells A Bajillion Copies, Becomes World’s Biggest Album. But is it the year’s best album? Funny enough, Michael Jackson‘s sixth LP hardly even affected the charts that year — it snuck out in late November, just as Men at Work’s 1981 blockbuster, Business as Usual, began its commercial stranglehold in the U.S. Only one record on our list, Fleetwood Mac‘s chart-targeted Tusk follow-up, Mirage, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. (Doesn’t it seem weird, looking back, that Prince‘s 1999 peaked at No. 9?) Lots of fascinating shit was happening in 1982, and you didn’t always find it on the radio. On our list, we included everything from early hip-hop (Grandmaster Flash) to horror-punk (Misfits) to lo-fi synth-pop (Solid Space). Revisit...
The 50 Best Alt-Rock Love Songs
Not all love songs are romantic. Not all love songs are even happy. It all depends on your definition of the term. For every “My Girl” or “Your Song,” there’s at least one track with a nuanced take on the darker, more complicated sides of love — the drama of a long-term relationship, the fear of losing a partner, the void left in love’s wake. Many of those songs fall under the admittedly broad umbrella of “alt-rock.” So to mark Valentine’s Day, we decided to gather 50 of our favorite “love songs” in the genre — both conventional and otherwise. Throughout this list, you’ll find lines about blooming romance and marital bliss. You’ll also find nods to drug addiction and car crashes. There’s something for everyone. – Ryan Reed 50. that dog. – “I’m Gonna See You” You take the good, you tak...
Peel Sessions From Nirvana, David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees Organized Online
Disc jockey John Peel was a music institution for almost four decades, highlighting influential bands and underground sounds on his BBC Radio 1 program. The shows featured over 4,000 in-studio sessions from over 2,000 artists — captured from 1967 up through his death in 2004. A good chunk of those recordings are floating around YouTube, but it’s exhausting trying to wade through them all. Now, thanks to blogger David Strickland, that process just got a whole lot easier. Over at his “Formally Known as the Bollocks” blog, Strickland is rounding up an exhaustive, alphabetized list of the Peel sessions available online — at least 1,000 so far. Highlights include two Nirvana performances (1990 and 1991), David Bowie’s 1972 recording with the Spiders from Mars, five sets from Siouxsie and the Ba...
