While double albums don’t quite carry the same impact the past 15 years in these post-physical format times, they used to be a fairly rare, but special event. At first it was the audacious act of an artist at their peak who had just too many damn great songs for a single album (Dylan, Beatles, Hendrix, Who). The seventies seemed to be the peak of double albums, which of course included artists who overreached a bit, perhaps thanks to some cocaine-assisted overconfidence (The Wall, Tusk). The best of them (Tago Mago, Exile On Mainstreet, Metal Box, London Calling) were glorious messes that still managed to cement the bands’ mythology at their prolific best, while others (Tales From Topographic Oceans, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Quadrophenia) were met with a bit more suspicion and criticism, but still retained a legendary aura.

Whether it was record companies tightening belts to ensure their profit margins, or artists weren’t feeling as audacious, fewer of these beasts lumbered into record stores in the 1980s, although XTC, Prince and Hüsker Dü were notable exceptions, each releasing two double albums during that decade. The one-two punch of SST double albums Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime got a lot of attention in 1984. While they didn’t rocket Hüsker Dü and the Minutemen straight to the mainstream, they got good press and did well on year-end polls and grew their audiences. The albums remain well regarded as classics alongside Daydream Nation, Sign O’ The Times, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and English Settlement. Yet two albums from 1981 that deserve just as much acclaim remain discarded and mostly forgotten. It was a pretty fertile year, with British psychedelic/post-punk at a fiery peak with albums from The Comsat Angels, The Sound, The Au Pairs, Echo & the Bunnymen and Siouxsie & the Banshees. One interesting double album from 1981 was Simple Mind’s Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call, produced by prog maestro Steve Hillage, adding a touch of Canterbury prog to their psychedelic post-punk combo. It’s arguably the best thing Simple Minds ever did. However, that wasn’t to be the best or even second best double album that year.

In the U.S., the underground was percolating on the fumes of regional new wave, punk and post-punk scenes which would later all be scooped under the umbrella of indie rock — X, Wipers, Gun Club, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Minor Threat, The dB’s, The Feelies, Mission Of Burma, Flesh Eaters, The Cramps, Effigies, Lyres, Polyrock, The Nuns, and The Replacements. Nearly all the bands worked their way up to album releases with a series of 7″ singles and EPs. R.E.M. only had one release out so far, their “Radio Free Europe” single. The B-52’s had unprecedented success with their 1978 “Rock Lobster” single and by the time they’d relocated to New York after the release of their album on Island in 1979. More commonly, bands like Pylon and The Method Actors remained local cult heroes, as well as locals The Swimming Pool Q’s and Love Tractor, both of whom released their first albums in 1981).

Actually The Method Actors, despite being reliable openers for Pylon (who guitarist Vic Varney was managing), weren’t even all that popular in Athens. They did much better in New York, Atlanta, Boston and Hoboken. They impressed Peter Dyer of Armageddon Records in the UK, who was there for a deal with Pylon. The Method Actors became a personal passion, and he flew them to London to record the majority of their output, starting with the single “The Method” (1980), a majestic post-punk anthem with guitar overdrive that rivals anything from the Wipers. It was a lot of sound, a “great audacious yawp of youth” as Varney put it, to come from just a guitarist and drummer (the chiseled cover model on their first single, David Gamble). This was before Flat Duo Jets, Cash Money, The White Stripes and The Black Keys made two-person bands a more commonly accepted occurrence.

The Method Actors – Little Figures (Armageddon, 1981)

They remained in London for an entire year, gigging and recording additional singles and EPs that took a grain of influence of their Athens scene, the sometimes frenetic rhythms of The B-52’s and the stiff repetition of Pylon, and expanded the sound with Beefheart freneticism and The Pop Group’s sonic anarchy, Gang Of Four’s martial funk, the spareness of Wire and Young Marble Giants, weedy tonalities of both the voice and guitar of Tom Verlaine (Television), and vocal histrionics of The Associates. Then came their opus, the double album Little Figures. Their yawpy vocals and scratchy, non-virtuosic guitar are not exactly accessible ear candy for the mainstream, but neither were Talking Heads for the most part. It’s as adventurous as anything from Public Image Ltd. and The Pop Group, and to my ears, even more enjoyable, from the opening mini-suite of “Strictly Gossip/Repetition” to the absurdist party anthem “Rang-A-Tang” featuring guest steel drums from Junius Deane, to the insistently thwacking “Ask Dana” that may have made an impression on The Fall’s Mark E. Smith. The death disco of “Commotion” bleeds into cubist funk of “E-Y-E.” Steel drums return to lighten the mood on “Halloween,” while “Hi-Hi-Whoopee” is a fantastic closer, causing the listener to wonder, what just happened? It’s a towering achievement, and the best album from an American band in 1981, edging out X’s Wild Gift, The Gun Club’s Fire Of Love and Wipers’ Youth Of America, not to mention Minor Threat and The dB’s.

So why was this album not worshipped as the mythic multi-horned beast of post-punk and art rock from the American South that it is? The London Calling/Metal Box of the U.S. indie scene? First of all DB records stripped it down to just 10 tracks for its US release, clipping its wings in the process. Still a great record, but simply missing nearly half the tracks of the original. Secondly, it’s never been reissued. While Acute Records did a beautiful job in assembling the early singles and EPs on This Is Still It (2010), they could only fit 9 of the tracks from Little Figures. Aside from the early East Coast dates, it doesn’t appear that the band spent much time touring the U.S. like they did in Europe. They put out one other album, the more concise Luxury (Press, 1983) that’s also well worth hearing but out of print. In Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, the book published in February by Grace Elizabeth Hale, The Method Actors get a few mentions, but the album gets no mention. Crazy. Hopefully someday it’ll get properly reissued and offered on Bandcamp. Until then, here’s a good vinyl rip:

The Suburbs – Credit In Heaven (Twin/Tone, 1981)

Another fertile music scene could be found in the Twin Cities, including The Suicide Commandos, Hypsterz, Curtiss A, The Suburbs, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and many more. As of 1980, by far the best record released so far was The Suburbs’ In Combo (Twin/Tone), a wildly eclectic mix of punk, pop, new wave and funk. Their 9-song 7″ self-titled EP from 1978 is also great. Songs like “Cows” and “Baby Heartbeat” weren’t exactly hits, but were well-known at my high school in Iowa as they got heavy rotation at school dances and parties, as did “Rattle My Bones” from their third album Love Is The Law (1983). While I do think Credit In Heaven is The Suburbs’ artistic peak, as great as Little Figures, I can at least partially understand why it became lost in the shuffle. First of all, the damn thing was nearly impossible to find. Twin/Tone either did not print many, or those who bought it held tight and treasured it, because it took me several years of searching before I could get my hands on a used copy in the late 80s. Secondly, there weren’t really any stand-out hooky singles.

The Suburbs were gloriously weird on their first album, and while they remained weird, they evolved quickly, and Credit In Heaven was a very different sounding album. Aside from “Tape Your Wife to the Ceiling” and “Macho Drunk,” the rough ‘n’ tumble punk sound was gone, replaced by a smoother, hypnotic groove that remains pretty consistent through the album. Chan Poling’s vocals alternated between suave Bryan Ferry croons and conversational chats along the lines of Lou Reed rather than screams and yawps. Piano and horns are featured throughout, giving it a more sophisticated post-punk jazz-funk fusion sound. Opener “Tired Of My Plans” is a great fusion of Talking Heads with more accessible elements of James Chance & the Contortions style no wave. “Ghoul Of Goodwill” is a haunting highlight that reminds me of The Specials’ contemporary single “Ghost Town,” with a mesmerizing drum and bass outro, accented with tasteful synth lines. The trance-inducing effect continues through “Dish It Up” and really the rest of the album, giving a feeling of suspended time, or perhaps a time warp. I often ended up surprised that the 1:06:03 went by so quickly. Of course it was a different experience back when I was flipping the record three times, until it’s belated 2001 reissue on CD.

There are no duds to my ears, but tracks like “Cigarette In Backwards” do stand out. “Girl Ache” starts out sounding like a Talking Heads outtake, but ends up more like a time-warp early preview of Paul Weller’s interests drifted from The Jam’s mod pop into the sophisticated soul jazz he’d feature in The Style Council. “Spring Came” features a jazzy ska rhythm for one of the poppiest moments on the album, including an uplifting guitar solo. I would have picked that for a single rather than “Music For Boys,” hardly the best song on the album. Nevertheless, it maintains tip top quality all the way through the end of the title track. There’s no shorthand comparison one can make as far as this being an equivalent to an album by any other band. It’s just that unique, which is perhaps why it never really clicked with a large enough audience. It’s never too late for a critical re-evaluation though. Consider this: I think it’s better than their labelmates’ infinitely more celebrated album, Let It Be (Twin/Tone, 1984). It’s a much more successful fusion of punk, funk, disco and jazz which The Clash haphazardly tackled on the triple album Sandinista! (1980). Or, imagine if, instead of taking time off for various side projects (Tom Tom Club, Byrne’s Catherine Wheel), Talking Heads produced a sleek and funky double album, a bridge between the experimental Remain In Light and dance pop-funk of Speaking In Tongues. Who knows how that would have went (the band were sick of each other and might have just disintegrated in flames), and Credit In Heaven is probably better than anything they’d have come up with.

There were high hopes for The Suburbs achieving mainstream success, and while their major label debut Love Is The Law (Polygram, 1983) simplified the band’s experimental approaches on Credit In Heaven, it’s title track certainly was worthy of being a hit. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be, and after the self-titled Suburbs (A&M, 1986), with another good tune in “Life Is Like,” albeit with extremely dated, glossy production, the band hung it up until 2013.

The Best U.S. Albums of 1981

1. The Method Actors – Little Figures (Press/Armageddon)
2. The Suburbs – Credit In Heaven (Twin/Tone)
3. X – Wild Gift (Slash) | Bandcamp
4. The Gun Club – Fire Of Love (Ruby)
5. Wipers – Youth Of America (Restless/Zeno) | Bandcamp
6. Mission Of Burma – Signals, Calls And Marches EP (Ace Of Hearts)
7. Tom Verlaine – Dreamtime (WB)
8. Pretenders – Pretenders II (Sire)
9. Wall Of Voodoo – Dark Continent (IRS)
10. The Replacements – Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash (Twin/Tone )
11. Holly And The Italians – The Right To Be Italian (Virgin/Wounded Bird)
12. The Cramps – Psychedelic Jungle (IRS)
13. Black Flag – Damaged (SST)
14. Billy Squier – Don’t Say No (Capitol/American Beat)
15. T.S.O.L. – Dance With Me (Frontier)
16. David Byrne – The Catherine Wheel (Sire)
17. Agent Orange – Living In Darkness (Posh Boy)
18. The dB’s – Stands for deciBels (EMI)
19. Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Mambo Nassau (Ze)
20. Glenn Branca – The Ascension (99 Records)
21. Riot – Fire Down Under (Fire Sign/Metal Blade)
22. MX-80 Sound – Crowd Control (Ralph ) | Bandcamp
23. Roky Erickson And The Aliens – The Evil One (415/Light In The Attic) | Bandcamp
24. Minor Threat – Minor Threat EP (Dischord) | Bandcamp
25. Monitor – Monitor (World Imitation/Superior Viaduct) | Bandcamp
26. Massacre – Killing Time (Celluloid)
27. James Blood Ulmer – Free Lancing (Columbia)
28. David Byrne/Brian Eno – My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (Sire)
29. Polyrock – Changing Hearts (RCA)
30. Minutemen – The Punch Line (SST)
31. Flesh Eaters – A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die (Slash/Superior Viaduct)
32. Van Halen – Fair Warning (WB)
33. The Cars – Shake It Up (Elektra)
34. Minor Threat – In My Eyes EP (Dischord) | Bandcamp
35. Tom Tom Club – Tom Tom Club (Island)
36. The Sleepers – Painless Nights (Adolescent/Superior Viaduct) | Bandcamp
37. The Swimming Pool Q’s – The Deep End (DB)
38. Dead Kennedys – In God We Trust, Inc. EP (Alternative Tentacles)
39. Alan Vega – Collision Drive (Island/Infinite Zero)
40. The Method Actors – Rhythms Of You EP (Armageddon)

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