The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 7

Yellow Magic Orchestra
Yellow Magic Orchestra

The Germans gave us movable type, the microphone, X-rays, and Aspirin. The Japanese gave us instant noodles, Aikido, karaoke, and a ping pong table you can wear on your face. The Germans gave us Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Georg Büchner. The Japanese gave us Haruki Murakami, Yukio Mishima, and Osamu Tezuka. The Germans gave us Wiener Schnitzel. The Japanese gave us sushi. But if you ever really needed to make a case for the differences between German and Japanese culture, you could simply compare Kraftwerk to the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Formed by keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto, drummer Yukihiro Takahashi, and bassist Haruomi Hosono in Tokyo in 1978, Yellow Magic Orchestra had originally been intended as a side project to record an album of electronic music inspired by Martin Denny’s exotica (a cover of his “Firecracker” opens the album). But the first album sparked a technopop craze in Japan, and by 1980, the group had an extensive touring schedule, two top ten records in Japan, and a profile in the American Rolling Stone. Truly, Yellow Magic Orchestra sounds a bit like a novelty record (so much that, when proposed for inclusion on this countdown, one of the staff members inside The Factual Opinion’s war room replied, “What is this, a joke?”), but the band’s effect on techno and electronic music cannot be understated.

Yellow Magic Orchestra took Kraftwerk’s blueprint for synthesizer driven dance music and exploded it. Where Kraftwerk were rigid and precise, Yellow Magic Orchestra were loose and sloppy. Where Kraftwerk had a seriousness of purpose, Yellow Magic Orchestra were playful and whimsical. Where Kraftwerk had an unwavering thematic unity, Yellow Magic Orchestra were all over the place. Where Kraftwerk sang in German about dancing automatons, Yellow Magic Orchestra sang in English and French about Suzy soothing away all your blues. Where Kraftwerk picked one sound per song and hammered it for eight minutes, Yellow Magic Orchestra took plenty of left turns. Where Kraftwerk were fun in a German, “I’m mocking you and myself on another level that you’ll never understand” kind of way, Yellow Magic Orchestra were fun in an overt, lifting-the-outhouse-up-with-a-crane-while-some-poor-guy is taking a shit kind of way.

Cultural generalization aside, Yellow Magic Orchestra is packed with jaw-dropping moments. The album begins with a recording of music from the video game “Circus” (in which you play a clown teetering on a seesaw), that Yellow Magic Orchestra accelerates into a mess of electronic garble that leads into their cover of “Firecracker.” “Firecracker” is a mish-mash of styles—Denny’s Latin flavored exotica, strongly European synthesizers, and traditional Japanese music—that contains an album’s worth of ideas in and of itself. It’s easy to see how the band could have simply intended to record the one song and throw everything they had at it. “Simoon” provides an even wonkier take on technopop, sounding a little like a tune that would come prerecorded when you buy a keyboard, until they begin to flip the melody with errant electronic noises. “Cosmic Surfin’” features electric guitar, carving a direct path to Cybotron’s early Chicago House music. “Tong Poo” recalls more video game music, while “La Femme Chinoise” is the album’s most fully rounded song, featuring Takahashi and Tomoko Nunoi (credited as “Sexy Voice”) telling the story of a Japanese escort.

When Kraftwerk appeared earlier in the countdown, we mentioned how they always seemed poised to take their place in history, like making music was their version of posing for a statue in a monument. Though they worked largely with the same palate, Yellow Magic Orchestra were the complete antithesis to Kraftwerk—whimsical and ephemeral. Where Kraftwerk conducted one grand experiment, Yellow Magic Orchestra conducted a thousand tiny ones. Without them, the last three decades of electronic music would have been a lot less fun.

-Martin Brown, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 8

Lee Perry
Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread

Here we are, knee deep in another album carved as much in legend as it is in critical acclaim: Lee Perry's first album to consist of him singing on every track, released by Perry's own label after it was rejected by Island Records, one of the last to be recorded in Perry's backyard studio before he walked into the room, covered the walls with marker, and, according to him, burned it to the ground. (His family and friends claim that's probably untrue, but c'mon: who do you want to believe on this one? It's too good a story.) Twinned with Return of the Super Ape, another Perry release under the Upsetters moniker, Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread is now considered to be some of the strongest work of Perry's career, not to mention serving as a sort of climax to his 70's sound. The years following these two albums weren't especially kind to Perry, and while that knowledge shouldn't impact the Corn Bread experience, they do. 

It's all but universally agreed now that Perry wasn't much of a singer on Roast Fish, and no amount of backward looks will dispute that. He's got a thin sounding voice that's often out of tune with the music, some of the songs divert into mumbling, and over the course of the ten tracks that make up the album, he can sound so distant that it requires a bit of effort to pay attention to his vocal presence at all. Thankfully, what's behind that voice, impossible to ignore, is a striking, smart production of a thoroughly dubbed masterpiece. On top of songs like these, any singer would have struggled.

Although purists probably find Roast Fish to be a distracted definition of what had become known as "dub" at the time, it's not accurate to refer to the album as reggae. There's too many effects on the album--the sounds of a baby wailing used as a punctuation to the drum and bass "riddim" sound, a too-infrequent echo manipulation of Perry's voice, an imposing, Spector-ish "Wall of Sound" quality that pushes the tightly wound snare drum as far as the listener's eyeballs--for it to be placed with any sort of legitimacy alongside what early 70's reggae artists had produced. Like King Tubby, Perry had moved on from that sound by '78, and while dub would really only be truly accepted as more then another reggae subgenre when the mid-80's work of Adrian Sherwood and On-U gave it more widespread attention, it's undeniable how much of that sound was already intact and available on Roast Fish. This wasn't a feeble grasp towards a new style. It was the new sound--no future innovation required. The only thing it needed was lyrics.

Perry filled the album with all the standards he knew were expected of him: social protest with "Big Neck Police", exhortations to smoke weed on the baldly titled "Free Up the Weed"--and they're great, sure. But he wasn't content with just that: "Throw Some Water In" is the Jamaican version of Radioheads "Fitter/Happier", with Perry telling the listener to learn to swim if they can't afford the gym, "Yu Squeeze My Panhandle" is an uncomfortable trip through Perry's attempts to convince some shithead radio dj to give his records a shot, and then, becuse you can't ignore what happened after the album dropped, the unsettling "Evil Tongues", where Perry dives headfirst into paranoiac rantings about hypocrites and liars--which isn't too dissimilar to the loathing he expressed at the time for some of the people he was working with. Due to the timing of the whole thing, with Roast Fish coming on top of what is probably the lowest emotional point of Perry's career, "Evil Tongues" can overpower the album's general theme. Don't let that happen. Sure, 1979 was going to be rough for the guy, but Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread isn't an album about that. It's a collection of pure artistry, from a guy who was working at the absolute peak of his powers. And while Lee's peak may not necessarily include being much of a vocalist, he more than makes up for it with his mastery over the sound that he, along with King Tubby, brought forth.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 9

Japan
Adolescent Sex

We're back in Nina Simone territory again--you aren't supposed to pay attention to Adolescent Sex. No, there's another Japan release from 1978, Obscure Alternatives, and that's the one that you're supposed to get behind. "Who says," you cry. "Tell them to bugger off, UK style, in keeping with the band's actual homeland", you snarl. "Tell me this person's name, so that I might include it in my post-nighttime-prayer mockery", you demand.

David Sylvian, the goddamn lead singer, that's who.

awww, what the fuck does that guy know.

Sylvian, along with his "mates", where only teenagers when Japan signed up with German record label Hansa in the mid 70's. Hansa's incredibly good taste--they put out David Bowie's Low and Heroes as well as Iggy Pop's Idiot and Lust for Life--eventually got them purchased and incorporated into the BMG empire, and during the late 70's, it was obvious why--the label couldn't do anything wrong. Besides Japan, Bowie and Iggy, the label also saw a nice fat paycheck with Boney M, which might have been why they had the money to get behind a bunch of teenagers too young to show anything but future promise. Japan's two 1978 albums didn't perform as well--despite a Wikipedia-rumored success, oddly enough, in Japan (the country)--but they did bring forth a sound that isn't really like anything else you'll find on this countdown. Sure, you'll find disparate strands of it--"The Unconventional" ends with a Goblin style outtro, the melodic layering of vocals and Roxy Music infused twang shows up on After The Heat as well as More Songs About Buildings And Food--but the overall experience of Adolescent Sex is one that's startlingly unique for the time period. There just isn't anything else in the year that can compare.

In 1978, the track of New Wave seems to have been "let's add _____ to a punk aesthetic, and then make it poppy. Also, make-up." In that vein, Japan had it down pat: they primped their hair, they boy-ed up their faces, and they warbled a bit when it came time for high notes. The difference between what they did with Adolescent Sex, as compared to other bands that played at the Lego style of music construction, was that they kept forgetting to add the punk thing back in while recording. Instead, they chased funk guitar sounds with synthesized effects while Steve Jansen--only 19 at the time of recording--started his long trek from youthful drumming talent to the in-demand studio player for just about every strand of music imaginable that he's been for the last two decades. On top of it was David Sylvian's vocals--and while they can arguably be said to have gotten better, there's something to be said for his haunting "I'm probably going to fuck your girlfriend, maybe your dad, just saying" delivery on Adolescent Sex. Mixing his blurts and yowls so it sounds like he's got a tin can between him and the microphone, Sylvian's vocals end up taking on a sound that is at times almost inhuman; it's less singing than it is another instrument bouncing from Mick Karn's pumped up bass guitar that, if you know how to fuck with an EQ, sounds like something that belongs underneath the sauntering feet of Shaft, who I have no fucking problem talking 'bout. Even when the songs start down the direction of being another weird and clueless attempt at British white boys playing Parliament, out comes the effects, and you start to pick up on how genius it was for Method Man to use all that space-rock prog on Tical--even without the instructions to "keep on bouncing", you're already there, and you've blasted off into space, no matter that it's Richard Barbieri's keyboards and not LSD at the controls. Japan knew it too--like Silver Mt. Zion in 2008, none of these songs end remotely when they should, there's clear indication on almost every track why radio hits didn't spring forth. You can't sell anybody on a 10 minute song about how weird it is to watch television, even less so when it's got a good four minutes worth of the individual band members fucking around with their instruments.

Nowadays, Japan is mostly acknowledged as the starting place for a group of talented musicians who apparently didn't get along that well--Steve Jansen's exhaustion of discussing the various stories in last years Wire interview made it clear it's a overly-trod upon subject--but what that story fails to touch upon is what was lost when the band failed to find the global success of 1978's other two big debut albums: The Police & Van Halen. From 1978 onward, it was simple: you either got laid while drunk and listening to Van Halen, or you tried to get laid while crying and listening to the Police. If Japan had hit it just as hard?

Man, shit would totally be like the Jetsons right now.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 10

The Rolling Stones
Some Girls

Exile in Main St. is a high water mark in the history of rock & roll, so it’s no surprise that The Rolling Stones struggled to maintain their creative momentum after its release in 1972. Subsequent albums Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock & Roll had their fans, but, by the time The Stones got working on 1976’s Black and Blue, they were undeniably in some sort of a rut. Essentially, the sessions for Black and Blue were auditions to find a replacement for guitarist Mick Taylor, who had joined the band just prior to the release of Let It Bleed, at the beginning of what many would argue was The Stones’ most fertile period. As a result, the guitar work on the recording of Black and Blue was stretched between Harvey Mandel, Wayne Perkins, and Ronnie Wood, who eventually replaced Taylor in the band. The songs on Black and Blue were designed to allow their prospective guitar players to wank around, but The Stones also adopted a healthy dose of funk and disco sheen for the recordings, with Mick Jagger comparing the band to the Ohio Players in the pages of Rolling Stone. The resulting album has a certain amount of charm, including a cover of early reggae song “Cherry Oh Baby,” and some jazz piano played by Billy Preston. Largely, though, it’s a hot mess. To make matters worse, The Stones felt that the best way to advertise the album was with an enormous billboard on Sunset Boulevard that depicted model Anita Russell in a torn dress, with her arms tied up and her legs tied open, the album cover nestled in between them, and a huge purple bruise on her chin.

The Rolling Stones have always had, let’s say, an interesting relationship with their own unyielding misogyny, ever since “Under My Thumb” compared Mick’s girl to a squirming dog, but the Anita Russell advertisement took it to a whole new blatant level, and it played no small part in their declining popularity. Of course, there were plenty of other factors contributing to The Stones’ lack of record sales and dismissal by critics that marked the time. This period from 1972 to 1977 created a lot of the negative associations that hang with The Rolling Stones today—that they were a group of drug addicts, that their best music was far behind them, that they were bigots, that they were millionaires completely out of touch with the working class blues they attempted to play, that they were dinosaurs, relics that had no place in the scene now that punk had come along and made them irrelevant. It was under these circumstances that The Rolling Stones began work on their last truly classic album, Some Girls.

Without ever tipping over into self-awareness, Some Girls wraps up all of the personal and musical turmoil surrounding The Stones in the late seventies, and shoulders it in one defiant, cohesive statement of purpose. Thought the funk, jazz and reggae explorations on Black and Blue were mildly embarrassing? Here’s “Miss You,” a song that could stand alongside the best rock songs of the decade, while still being able to get asses shaking on the dance floor—enough so that the band even released an extended version for the discos. Think Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are too strung out to play? Worried that Ron Wood isn’t fit to clean up Richards’ vomit, to say nothing of filling Mick Taylor’s spot in the band? Here’s some of the most dynamic and diverse music in The Stones’ catalogue. Think they’re incapable of producing more than one hit per album anymore? How about four charting singles in the U.S. and U.K.? Think the band is misogynist? They’re even more misogynist than you think! Think that Mick Jagger is gay? He’ll drop “When the Whip Comes Down” just to fuck with you. “Shattered” features a vocal performance that could almost be considered rap. “Imagination” is such a ballsy reclaiming of The Temptations’ soul that The Stones don’t even bother to use the song’s full title. “Beast of Burden” is so emotional, it might just prove that Jagger is not a sociopath.

The Rolling Stones’ work in the sixties, and their ridiculous Let It Bleed/ Sticky Fingers/ Exile On Main St. hot streak made them legends, but Some Girls turned them into a band you could never count out, no matter how much was leveled against them. Rarely has one album refuted so many nay-sayers. As their popularity waned, and a new generation rose up to take their place, The Rolling Stones were supposed to retire and fade into the sunset. Instead, they set themselves up for one of the longest, most financially and musically successful careers in rock. Plenty of bands are at their best when they have something to prove; when The Rolling Stones have something to prove, they rewrite history.

-Martin Brown, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 11

The Cars
The Cars

For better or worse, The Cars’ self-titled debut laid out the blueprint for a decade’s worth of radio-friendly rock & roll. Without it, there would never have been a Huey Lewis & the News, a Greg Kihn Band, a Robert Palmer (who reviewed the album for Rolling Stone upon its release), or a Duran Duran—and while those names might not immediately set your toes a-tappin’, it’s difficult to overstate how omnipresent their sound was in the early 80’s, until Guns n’ Roses came along and flipped the script. What’s fascinating about The Cars is how disparate the styles are that the band attempts to weave together—taking cues from psychedelia, bar rock, punk, new wave, Roxy Music-style glam, and proto-punk along the lines of The Modern Lovers (whose Dave Robinson was their drummer), among other things—and how fully formed the band sounds upon arrival, two traits that almost none of their successors shared.

The Cars begins with three stone classics. “Good Times Roll,” while dressed up as a party-starter, is something other than what it pretends to be. Rick Ocasek sings “Let the good times roll” as if he’s been forcibly strapped into an easy chair, made to eat cake until he vomits as the party goes on around him. Synthesizers blast and guitars scrape and scramble, while an army of back-up singers harmonize in the same slightly-icky monotone. The whole thing ambles along in a decidedly un-raging mid-tempo strut. Ocasek’s lyrics almost immediately begin mocking the party: “Let the good times roll/ Let them make you a clown/ Let them leave you up in the air/ Let them brush your rock & roll hair.” The whole thing is, well, totally weird—but the song has been so absorbed into mainstream culture, nobody notices. The Cars might be one of the most subversive bands ever.

“My Best Friend’s Girl” opens with the kind of surgical bass riff that would make Wire or The Strokes wet themselves. Rick Ocasek somehow turns Jonathan Richman’s stuffy-nosed, half-ironic, speak-singing technique into something that could rock a stadium, aided by call-and-response vocals and hand-claps (side note: a man who doesn’t love hand-claps is a sad, lonely man). Elliott Easton makes a case for himself as one of the most underrated guitar players in rock by shoehorning a rockabilly solo into the mix. Then, “Just What I Needed” is all like, “uh-uh,” and tops it. The opening bass notes are more staccato, and punctuated with full-on guitar kerrangs. Bassist Benjamin Orr takes over the vocals and turns a performance even more distant, more sullen, and, somehow, more anthemic; Easton’s guitar work is even cooler.

None of the other songs reach the same iconic stature as the first three, but they’re just as substantial. “I’m In Touch With Your World” is a deconstructed ballad, built on throwaway percussion and keyboard noises. “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” begins defiant and turns pleading, while personal favorite “Bye Bye Love” crams an epic amount of feeling into its three-word chorus. And, of course, “Moving In Stereo” later took on a whole new life as the song that soundtracks Brad Hamilton watching Linda Barrett removing her bikini in his imagination in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yet, “Good Times Roll,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Just What I Needed” are classics because they follow the blueprint of early rock & roll—essentially, they’re songs for teenagers. The difference being that this was a post-Watergate, disaffected generation of teenagers, and The Cars fittingly tricked out their songs with irony, distance and a healthy amount of cool in order to reach them. Fine, yes, we’ll party all the time, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be happy about it.

-Martin Brown, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 12

Bruce Springsteen
Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Coming off the heels of Born To Run, Bruce's breakout album that brought him to a thousand radio stations and millions of new listeners, lost in the savagery of production problems, in-fighting with record labels and "sound in my head", Darkness On the Edge Of Town was recorded with the full band, all at once, sometimes minutes after the songs were written. It's all legend.

Except it's not completely true.

While the talk surrounding the recording process of Darkness lends a veneer of rebellion and iconoclasm to the story, the truth was that the album was recorded over an extended period of time beginning in 1977, and while Bruce was in a sort of "recovery" from the explosive success of Born To Run, Darkness isn't some kind of raw-dog punk album where he smartly put the haters in their place by showing that he there was more to him than barn-burner working man rock--no, that wouldn't happen until Nebraska showed up. It's a fun story though. Darkness, as raw as it can be at times, isn't a slap-dash recording of anger and rage. There's horns on it, for god's sake. The songs were recorded with the full band at once after Bruce wrote them, sure, but that points to an artist who just knew what he was doing in advance, an improvisation in the fabled Jay-Z "freestyle writing" category. The years of war with his former manager put him on the road with Born To Run, and by the time he made it back into the studio for the Darkness sessions, something had changed, and you can tell he knew it too: no longer just a down-home Jersey boy, he'd toured the world, he'd torn down his own promotional posters, he'd seen a poverty and powerlessness that he'd previously only read about. While it would be years before the explicitness of his disgust would become more apparent as fully realized concept, Darkness On the Edge Of Town was his first real shot at it. The album art--a photograph of a surly, wide-eyed kid at home--told a story, sure, one about a cocky, tired kid. But there's an out-take snap from the same session that tells it better, where Bruce can't hold back the image any longer, and what glares into the camera is a skinny, exhausted guy, unsure of what it was he was doing, and unsure of where it was he was going. It wasn't that Bruce was giving up on his love of music, but it would be years before age and maturity would return the type of shameless, grinning joy expressed on the cover of Born To Run's. He didn't plan to abandon his sound to make a Clash album, but that didn't make him any less cantankerou--that's not to say he avoided it though. There's a the petulance to Darkness, with the lyric a  "...a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything" from "Badlands", a fiery condemnation of the world that conceieved, raised and lied to him on "Adam Raised A Cain"--not to mention a full minute intro of a decidedly unfriendly-to-top-40 wailing--even the song that became the main single, "Prove It All Night", speaks of a love between two people who, just to survive, already had to learn what it was "to steal, to cheat, to lie". Personally, I don't believe that Bruce finally made good on the promises hinted at on Darkness At The Edge Of Town until the release of Nebraska. But in 1978? That was enough.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 13

Wire
Chairs Missing

Although the king of the one-two-three-all good music 1978 title obviously belongs to Brian Eno, here we are with his runner-up, an album that he might have ended up on if producer Mike Thorne hadn't acceded to Colin Newman's request to bring in more synthesizers. (When Mike initially refused, Newman apparently said "Then we'll just get that Brian Eno guy". Thorne acquiesced immediately.) Arriving less than a year after Wire had dropped Pink Flag, an abrasive, solid punk album that screeched and howled with what might be considered an against-all-odds "maturity", Chairs Missing is the sort of thing that we're all content to now call post-punk.

Enjoy this moment, it's rare: the plastering of genre label is spot on.

It's tempting to throw a superchunk of credit to Mike Thorne--without his synthesizer and hundred dollar electronics, Chairs Missing could have ended up being just another follow-up throwdown, another punk album. Thing is, Thorne was just following orders, and while those orders included letting him do his thing, they also had some specific checks to make: loops and whistles, bells and clicks. Thankfully, the post-production work is seamless enough that none of Thorne's work reads as paint job, and Chairs Missing stands around looking lopsided when placed alongside what would have been Pink Flag's brothers.

Opening with "Practice Makes Perfect", it's clear that Wire aren't out to create too many hit singles: gloomy, horror movie moans punctuate Colin Newman's yelling of "Waiting for us...waiting, and waiting, and waiting" as the thump of the instruments eventually settles into an unsettling ring that takes over the last 40 seconds of the song's run time. You can't bang your head to this, but if you did, you'd just end up swaying like a metronome. The album follows that arc through "French Film Blurred", and then there's a pretense towards changing it up in "Another the Letter", a 67 second track that sounds like it was created solely to showcase how creepy merry-go-rounds would be if Wire was hired to soundtrack them. Rapidly spitting out vocals until the song stops at the revelation that the "letter" of the title is, in fact, a suicide note--by this point, you're either on board or not. The embrace of a Goblin/Tangerine Dream style of synth takes over for the opening of "Being Sucked In Again", only to be smashed once again by controlled, muted guitars only allowed to spit forth seconds of sound. The whiplash of "Mercy", a song that grinds all of its noise into succinct closers for each measure while the bassist struggles to control the tempo. The 94 second "Outdoor Miner", the closest thing to a single the record label could find on the album, a song they asked the band to expand to single length despite it having lyrics about lizards, leopards and a miner laying down to be buried underground in the "earth which he's known since birth."

"I Am The Fly", the singular breakout song that most people know from the album, an anthemic song that prefigured and probably created the sound--throbbing, industrialized punk gone pop--the band would play throughout the 80's before their most recent--yes, they're still going--return to noisier pastures.

That's the album. It isn't punk.

1978 was a year where a lot of incredibly catchy disco songs were created. A year where you could look to the opening shots from bands that would go on to define the global sound of pop, punk, dub and new wave. But it was also a year where established bands worked to innovate and explore their range of sound. Wire was, to be kind, neither. Pink Flag was their debut album, it had only been on the shelves for seven months when Chairs Missing showed up. While both albums would go on to be considered--rightly so--as some of the most important and strongest of the decade, in August of 1978, Wire was just another punk band doing a follow up. If ever there was a time to rest on laurels and repeat what worked, this was it. Instead, they chased their own demons, argued their producers into bowing to their obsessions, and dispensed with what was catchy in sixty-second tracks. It's a testament to the strength of 1978 that something as gutsy as this album sits this low on the countdown. If the race to the top were judged by courage alone? 

We'd be talking top five material.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 14

Goblin
Patrick

One of three excellent Goblin releases in 1978--the other two being the soundtrack to Zombi and the somewhat unwieldy concept album Il Fantastico Viaggio del Bagarozzo Mark--Patrick was a commissioned piece created for the Italian release of an independent Australian film. More wide-ranging than Zombi in its sound, more focused than Fantastico, Patrick is also the most playful of any of the instrumental albums on this list. (Well, at least one of us thinks that.) Considering that 1978 was a year thoroughly entrenched within the superstar film composition era of John Williams, who had followed Jaws with the one-two-three punches of Star Wars, Close Encounters & 1978's Superman scores, it's a fetching and altogether delightful experience to be at play with something like Patrick--a film score separated in creation from the film itself, as Patrick already had music. (And rest assured, that existent soundtrack is god awful. Woe to any Australian who saw the film without Goblin's whistles tingling in their ears.) With an eclectic mix of prog-rock and the burgeoning power of the 70's synthesizer, Patrick set itself the simplest of goals: lend an emotional lilt to the creepy horror story of a coma patient as he falls in homicidal love with his attending nurse, accent the fear in a film without the budget for over-the-top stunt effects, make strange that which is funny. (And by "funny", we mean the acting in Patrick, which is about as bad as any other late 70's/early 80's low budget genre flick.) Whereas the Zombi soundtrack can, at times, overpower a bit of the film--Goblin's insanely catchy nightly tunes for the television news in that film is one of those tracks far more interesting than what's on screen--the Patrick score works to add a not-on-paper dimensionality that the film wouldn't have achieved on its own. It's not a simple "music made movie better" thing, Patrick may have some terrible acting, but it is an effective horror flick, the music doesn't change that--it's that Goblin made something that can stand completely on its own, a narrative on its own feet. Considering how brief their candle burned in the late 70's, with the revolving door of membership spinning almost as quickly as their soundtracks were being released, it's remarkable that Patrick came into existence at all. But it did, and it remains one of the most effective examples of the sound that Goblin, for too brief a time, had down to a science.

-Tucker Stone, 2009