Early 80's hidden gems?

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A few more vintage 'deep' early 80's tunes although the bands / musicians themselves weren't necessarily a product of that era:

Is there supposed to be some sort of link between Faith No More and Vangelis, or are these two pretty much distinct strands of music you are talking about? (I suspect it's the latter, but I'm just checking.)

I mean, to me, Faith More More and Vangelis sound about as different as two musical artists can be. But I suppose if there is some link between post punk and psychedelic synth music, then it might be that both were I think influenced by the krautrock and space-rock of the 70s.

There were some artists that worked with both styles. For example, Jah Wobble was in the post-punk band Public Image Limited, and then went on to make some ambient electronic music with the likes of Brian Eno and The Orb.

You might be interested in some of the recommendations on Pierro Scaruffi's website. He is a writer and music critic who (to his annoyance) is probably best known for a long essay about why he doesn't like The Beatles. To be honest, I don't believe he can possibly listened to all of the huge number of albums that he has reviewed on his website, but he seems to have a particular fondness for experimental post-punk music and space-rock. His recommendations may or may not be obscure to you; most of them are pretty obscure to me.

Scaruffi's main site: https://www.scaruffi.com/
His top post-punk albums: https://www.scaruffi.com/music/postpunk.html
His top new wave albums: https://www.scaruffi.com/music/newwave.html
His top industrial albums: https://www.scaruffi.com/music/industri.html
His top psychedelic albums: https://www.scaruffi.com/music/psych.html

Ahem!

Yeah, nothing in common other than being active during the 1980's and Vangelis reminding me of some of the early 80's ambient I've heard. They both have in common being early / mid 80's and pointing at the (musically and culturally) unseen.

Now for what I was talking about with early Faith No More being psychedelic:





With Faith No More I almost feel like I could parallel their career path to Pink Floyd in a way. Early stuff (before Chuck Mosely) would be like Saucerful of Secrets and Ummagumma, Chuck Mosely era would be like Meddle, and The Real Thing, Angel Dust, etc. would be Dark Side of the Moon and later.

What they have in common is they both started out with wild psychedelic sound pallets and then tightened things down for a 'super band' kind of sound. What I'm really curious about is the early 80's psychedelic stuff that might have influenced Roddy Bottum and Billy Gould in exploring that pallet.

I could say similar things for Psi Com and Jane's Addiction if I mashed them together but it would be unfair both in the sense that they decided it was enough discontinuity to start fresh and technically Jane's Addiction stayed pretty psychedelic and they didn't have a super radio-friendly album, ie. pretty much everything was their equivalent of Angel Dust.

Now, Psi Com and early Faith No More - a lot in common IMHO in terms of sound. You could just about throw this stuff in the 'Lost Boys' soundtrack (also if 'Xiola' is anything to go by - I like Perry's taste in women when he goes that way):





Cool! I'll see what he's on about then!

I love the swag on this one.

This Romeo Void song might resonate with many here


They had another MTV hit with 'A Girl in Trouble is a Temporary Thing' in '84 then their record company dropped them because of Debora Iyall's weight.

meat puppets II - meat puppets
double nickels on the dime - minutemen

aint exactly hidden but definitely gems

I've seen both of those come through highly rated in other places as well. Will have to jump on them.

Yes, I am really posting that song

“there are no vacations, just evacuations”

should do the others as albums too...

traven's Scientist posts reminded me to post this (Cevin Key's 'What's In My Bag'), Scientist was on his list as well as a lot of really good late 70's and early 80's industrial and underground albums: