Four on the Floor – 1981.

 

Some would say an excellent year for rock music, but I happen to think it’s the year that the rot set in, these are still good albums however I believe the seeds of a new movement in the rock world was set in motion in this year, it may have taken seven or eight years to come to fruition but this was the edge of the precipice, read on and I’ll explain.

Blue Oyster Cult – Fire of Unknown Origin. – 9/10.

The last decent album for nearly Fifteen years, the next studio album The Revolution by Night was good but not great, but this was the pinnacle until Heaven Forbid came along in 1998. It was also the second and the last album produced by Martin Birch who always seemed to get the best out of bands, playing wise, song writing, bands seemed to step up to the plate for Martin, it’s also the last album of the original line up before Albert Bouchard had a hissy fit and buggered off, the songs (all 9 of them) are of a great standard and the artwork was something special, I remember having a shop display poster in my bedroom which took up most of one wall, after this it was the start of ever decreasing circles for the band they were and still are a great live band, but albums of quality were few and far between, they remain in my top three of bands that I love, but it was a slippery slope after this recording wise.

ACDC – For Those About to Rock.  6/10.

I know I’m going to get slaughtered for this but I do have my reasons, released a little over a year after back in Black, they then toured for the best part of a year and then jumped into the studio in the six weeks Mutt Lange had spare from all the other work he was doing in 1981 and the production for me suffers, as does the songwriting, maybe they should have had a little longer off, is it a bad album, hell no, it simply sounds tired, I saw the band on this tour and it was great and the songs that they played sounded so much better live than on the record, a couple of the songs are amongst my favourite Brian Johnson era ACDC songs, Lets get it up, Breaking the Rules and COD (Care of the Devil) I love, the rest were simply ok, again they remain a massive band but with the exception of Back in Black, I only like a couple of tracks from the rest of the later albums, they did start taking longer between albums and they are still one of the biggest bands in the world. but even Rick Rubin and Bruce Fairburn couldn’t save the albums that followed, they relied on their own abilities too much when in reality sometimes an outside set of eyes would have helped, to be honest the later albums didn’t have the sparkle of the Bon Scott era which every album was chock full of classics!

Foreigner – 4.   8/10.

Yet another Mutt Lange production from 1981, he was heading to a more polished sound to his production tasks, and to me again although Foreigner did some good albums after this, nothing that matched the quality of this, the album took 8 months of spit and polish to complete and there were many tears and tribulations along the way, was it worth it, I think so this album broke the band worldwide with the album breaking into the top twenty just about everywhere in the world and selling six million copies in the USA alone.

Van Halen – Fair Warning. 8.5/10.

As usual a short album a little ove31 minutes, but those 31 minutes are chock full of riffs and squeals, again I think this is the last great album of the original band , yes I enjoyed diver Down (basically a cover album) and 1984, again just over 30 minutes of mayhem but  the writing was on the wall as the band were going their separate ways, Eddie was wanting expand from the riffs and the talking type of singing ( hence when they became Van Hagar) I remember having a dodgy video of a gig in the USA from this tour, and they were simply awesome, the only issue for me on this album were the last two tracks, its like they needed something to fill the album up to the obligatory 30 minutes, and simply took two demoes that weren’t finished, but who cares when you hear the riff for Unchained kicks and everything else is forgiven.

So that’s my take on 1981, yes there were loads more classic albums, but I picked these because to me these bands were never the same after this, yes they remained big bands but in reality thrash was just around the corner and grunge was creeping up on the coattails, bands got rich and bloated in 1981 and the rot set in shortly after, please don’t send any death threats its just an opinion we all have them!