#268 The Best Album of 1989, Round 1 Match #29: New Order vs. Billy Joel
Hey folks!
Today’s Best Album of 1989 match is:
#12 New Order, TECHNIQUE
vs.
#117 Billy Joel, STORM FRONT
To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.
We have two Designated Cheerleaders today! First up, it’s @atcl.bsky.social for STORM FRONT! Take it away, atcl!
You can’t say that Billy wasn’t giving it his all on Storm Front. We have a Force 9 blowing on the try-hard scale. Joel’s default vocal approach can best be described as “blustery.”
Perhaps more so than any of Joel’s 11 other pop-rock albums, Storm Front has aged into retroactive cringe, but it was dang popular upon release, and not just with the adult contemporary set. Among the 4 million copies sold, a dozen or so were purchased by me and other kids in my fifth grade class. We all spent our allowances on cassette copies and listened to it repeatedly and asked our parents who Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini and Dacron were.
Let’s get this out of the way: “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is unlike any pop hit before or since. It came out of nowhere. No one was expecting a patter song to top the Billboard Hot 100 a century after Gilbert & Sullivan. It inspired a legion of parodies and middle school social-studies assignments (my wife still talks about the group project where they were given a verse to research). And as an exercise in creating a cascade of rhyming cultural and political references, it’s well executed!
BUT, there is more to Storm Front than “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” If “Allentown” didn’t cement his position, “The Downeaster Alexa” puts Joel squarely alongside Springsteen and Mellencamp in the “plight of the working man ’80s ballad” cannon. I urge voters to give the back half of the album an honest listen. Musically, “Leningrad” is legitimately a beautiful piece of classical composition. “And So It Goes” probably the most heartbreaking thing Joel has ever written. But over the years, “State of Grace” has quietly become my favorite song on the album. It’s yet another mid-tempo rocker, but the chords progress in some unexpected directions, it has some lovely organ textures, and Joel’s voice sounds full of real regret and sadness when he sings, “I’m losing you … ” on the bridge.
Storm Front is full of these little moments that stick with you for years afterward. I can’t explain why “Ay-yi-yiiiii-yo!” still echoes in my head, but it does. Yeah, the album can be a bit of a mess, but it’s not dull or forgettable. Joel, staring down 40, could easily have followed a trajectory into aging-rock-star laziness. That’s not what this is.
Garth Brooks, in explaining his decision to make “Shameless” into a country arena showstopper, says that he accidentally got stuck with a copy of Storm Front via a Columbia House membership (lol), but he gave the CD a listen. Then he listened again and again and again. “I fell in love with the album,” he wrote in the liner notes for his greatest hits collection, “and fell back in love with Billy Joel's music.” I hear ya, Garth. If loving this album makes a total fool of me, well, IT’S OUT OF MY HANDS!
Thank you, @atcl.bsky.social!
Then we have @kevinalexander.bsky.social for TECHNIQUE! (It was originally published in Kevin’s newsletter here.) Take it away, Kevin!
There’s not much point in burying the lede here; this lookback won’t come close to being objective. If you’ve been with us for more than a few weeks, you know my love for this band and are keenly aware that On Repeat Records could devolve into a New Order fan page at any moment.
That said, this record is a massive achievement for the band at a time when not much else was going right for them-certainly not internally, anyway. To put something out amidst so much strife and financial pressure alone would be worth noting. That it is some of the best work they’ve ever produced makes it all the more remarkable.
Most people will remember March 24th, 1989, as the date the Exxon Valdez ran aground. I remember walking to the closest shopping mall to get tickets to see New Order.
That was the closest Ticketmaster outlet, and I was probably halfway down the street before my mom had even finished giving me permission. With the benefit of hindsight — and now being a parent myself — I now know what a huge leap of faith this must’ve been for her. We lived in the suburbs, and she was giving the green light to an (almost) 14 yr. old to ride the bus across the metro area to see a band she heard nonstop but didn’t know.
I suppose on some level you just know when to let your kids leap.
The band was on the road supporting their 5th studio album, Technique, and it came out when I was in junior high. The record was one of the bright spots in an otherwise blah era for me.
If Low Life is a show at an intimate venue, Technique is a sweaty rave filled with strobe lights and ecstasy. Indeed, the record was partly recorded in Ibiza with the band off their rockers. Technique is firmly rooted in the sounds surrounding them in their new environs. They choose the sunny locale at Hook’s insistence after a run of recordings made in “dark and horrible” London studios. The band decamped for Ibiza, hoping the change in scenery (and menu of drugs) would have the same positive effect that New York had had for them years earlier.
It worked…sort of…
After four months, the band only had ‘Fine Time’ and a couple of other tracks recorded to show for their time on the island. Declaring their holiday over, their label called them back to the UK, where they finished the record at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios.
We had expected to hear a lot of acid house music when we got to Ibiza because that had taken off in Manchester two to three months before we left, but we didn’t – we were hearing something called Balearic Beat,” Bernard said. We were actually disappointed at first because we were really into acid house, and what we heard, this Balearic Beat, was this crazy mash-up of styles and really commercial-sounding but there was also some really good stuff. By the end of our time there we were really influenced by it.
Their time in the sun may seem unproductive on the surface, but it had left an indelible mark on the group’s sound.
Fine Time is an
acid-houseBalearic Beat classic. Round and Round1 is pop perfection and saw decent airtime on MTV.Run is credited to not only New Order, but also (*checks notes) John Denver?!
Yes, really. Denver sued the band, alleging that the guitar riffs were lifted from his Leaving On a Jet Plane. The case was settled out of court, with his name subsequently added to the credits.
We could do a track-by-track breakdown, but the short version is this: Technique feels like the band's most honest record. Whether that’s down to the drugs or the Balearic sun, I don’t know. In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps more importantly, it is economical. Listening to it, every note has its place, and there is nothing extraneous. It's both a dance record and a pop record—in other words, a New Order record—but listening to it, there is a discipline that sets it apart from the band’s previous work.
The songs themselves are compact; the sequencers nailed down— there is no 9-minute version of anything on this LP. By this point, the band had also mastered the art of shifting between pop and dance tracks.
On Brotherhood, a distinct boundary exists between the two (literally- the styles each have their own side on the album). There are no guardrails here; the band makes segueing between styles look easy.
All of that is well and good, but why is it my number 1?
Technique was really the first record by the band that I found on my own. Yes, I knew them. Yes, I’d heard almost everything they had recorded up to that point. But this was different; I’d learned of its release on my own and gone and bought it with my own money.
No hand-me-downs from friends' older siblings or songs clipped from mix tapes. You always remember your first…
Good records always take you somewhere special. Thirty-five years later, Technique still does that for me.
Thank you, Kevin!
For more on TECHNIQUE (and to a certain degree, STORM FRONT), be sure to check out @nanette.bsky.social and @putnam39.bsky.social’s blog the best thing today, as TECHNIQUE is Nanette’s favorite 1989 album and I know she has a lot to say. (I’m sure Jon does too!)
Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.
Yesterday, #37 Tracy Chapman, CROSSROADS defeated #92 Emmylou Harris, BLUEBIRD 74-34-3.
Thanks for reading and voting!
Kent