CD Review: Various "Casey Kasem Presents America's Top Ten - 1980s New Wave's Greatest Hits" (Top Sail/Sony)

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 20:49:24 +0000 (UTC)
Newsgroups: rec.music.reviews
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Various "Casey Kasem Presents America's Top Ten - 1980s New Wave's Greatest
Hits" (Top Sail/Sony)
Top Sail's recent pair of collections, one featuring 70s classic rock, and
this one featuring 80s new wave hits, are an interesting contrast. Both
catalog the commercial spin of underground movements; 70s classic rock
having been, to a large extent, a by-product of underground rock of the late
60s, and 80s new wave having been a commercial spin-off of late-70s punk
rock. What separates them, however, is the humanity and lasting
listenability of the music.
The guitar-fueled rock of the 70s retains an earthy presence that, while
certainly of its time in many ways, still shows much of the music's original
vitality. In contrast, 80s new wave, or at least many of the cuts
anthologized here, feel contrived. Perhaps it's an inability to separate
these tracks from the embryonic videos that gained them play on a
pre-geologic MTV. How can anyone hear A Flock of Seagull's "I Ran (So Far
Away)" without thinking of Mike Score's haircut? Or a-ha's "Take On Me"
without remembering the accompanying animated/live-action video? Perhaps
it's just the disposable nature of so many of these bands - the count of
one-hit wonders is lengthy.
Nearly every one of these tracks is likely to make you think more of the
video that made it a hit than where you were or who you were with the first
time it played. And perhaps that's a mark of just how well this volume is
selected, since they show just how influential style and video were for
top-40 new wave of the 80s. Since many of these tracks were produced to
sound mechanical, it's no surprise that they retain that feeling today. But
what might have sounded innovative in 1982, now sounds like an over-reliance
on synthesizers. What still stands out, though, are the remarkable vocalists
(Annie Lennox, Boy George, Roland Gift, and Chrissie Hynde, among others)
who often fronted these bands. Top Sail's stuffed nearly 80 minutes of music
on this disc, providing your retro-80s party non-stop dancing action!
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