#29
Husker Du
"Zen Arcade" (1984)
This album can seem overwhelming at first-it's a double album, supposovely a concept album, and it's a hardcore album (not if you ask me-i'll get to that later). I'll admit, my first few times listening, I couldn't penetrate it-I had heard so much about it, and I was starting to wonder why. Thankfully, It finally clicked.
It was a few songs that finally did the trick. First, "Pink Turns to Blue". Great guitar riff, melody, and that really strange sound they make alot on this album, it sounds like a piano with reverb tacked on it recorded in the 1930's. In fact, the whole thing sounds terrible (I mean that in the best of ways). Sometimes I feel like this is the most lo-fi album I own, and I have demos from bands that were recorded on tape recorders. The guitar distortion is evtremely muffling, sometimes you can barely tell the chords are changing, theres that odd piano sound, and the drums sound very far away-that said, the sound, although lo-fi, has alot of personality. I can't say that any other record sounds like it, even their follow up, "New Day Rising", which was cleaner (but not nearly as slick as their later albums).
The next is an odd choice I'm sure, for anyone who knows this album well. The song that made me go out and purchase this. At the time I couldn't download music on my computer, but I had speakers. So when I would hear about an album getting lots of acclaim that seemed up my alley, I'd go to amazon and listen to the thirty second clips of each song. "Monday Will Never Be the Same" is an instrumental, with just piano, but that melody absolutely gripped me from the moment I heard it. One of my favorite instrumentals of all time, and it just happens to be the last song anyone would name from this record.
So a year or so after I got this, I was reading some article from the 80's praising both "Zen Arcade", and the Replacements' "Let It Be". They were saying how "Let It Be" is album of the year, but song of the year was "Turn on the News", from this album. I realized it was a song I never noticed (which happens frequently with double-albums-a truly great double-album will have at least one amazing song you don't notice until much after you've listened to it), and listened. I was blown away. I couldn't believe I never noticed this gem before. Husker Du's ultimate anthem, and it has handclaps, probably my favorite thing to hear in a song.
This has been called a 'hardcore' album, or sometimes 'crossover', but it's really just plain and simple 'rock' that was at least ten years ahead of it's time. If this came out in the 90's, it probably would have been called grunge even. The term 'hardcore' isn't very accomadating to experimentation, hence my view that this is not a 'hardcore' album. This is a 'hardcore' band trying to write 'The White Album'.
'Zen Arcade' can be challenging, I myself took a while to really praise it to the point that I do now. But I assure you, its worth the effort to get into it. And listen to "Turn on the News". Like myself, I'm sure you'll be baffled at how you've let it slip through the cracks for so long.
87/100