Status Quo If You Can't Stand The Heat (1978) [2cd, Deluxe Edition]

Mike Oldfield's groundbreaking album Tubular Bells is arguably the finest conglomeration of off-centered instruments concerted together to form a single unique piece. A variety of instruments are combined to create an excitable multitude of rhythms, tones, pitches, and harmonies that all fuse neatly into each other, resulting in an astounding plethora of music. Oldfield plays all the instruments himself, including such oddities as the Farfisa organ, the Lowrey organ, and the flageolet. The familiar eerie opening, made famous by its use in The Exorcist, starts the album off slowly, as each instrument acoustically wriggles its way into the current noise that is heard, until there is a grand unison of eccentric sounds that wildly excites the ears…

Released in 1978, just as the hot streak starting with 1975's Fighting and running through 1977's Bad Reputation came to an end, Live and Dangerous was a glorious way to celebrate Thin Lizzy's glory days and one of the best double live LPs of the 70s. Of course, this, like a lot of double-lives of that decade - Kiss' Alive! immediately springs to mind - isn't strictly live; it was overdubbed and colored in the studio (the very presence of studio whiz Tony Visconti as producer should have been an indication that some corrective steering may have been afoot). But even if there was some tweaking in the studio, Live and Dangerous feels live, containing more energy and power than the original LPs, which were already dynamic in their own right. It's this energy, combined with the expert song selection, that makes Live and Dangerous a true live classic.

After seven years at the top of the British charts, even Status Quo fans were beginning to wonder whether the band wasn't simply rewriting the same riff over and over again, then putting it out with a new catch phrase for a title. From "Down Down" to "Rocking All Over the World," Status Quo had enacted some of the most excitingly primal rock behemoths of the decade. But they'd also composed some of the most enduring clichés as well. However, nothing - repeat nothing - could have prepared the world for Whatever You Want, a record which, almost three decades later, still sounds like the most ruthless piss-take you've ever heard. And, of course, it became one of their biggest hits ever. Mercifully, the remainder of the album titled by this unfortunate monstrosity shows that there was more than one idea rattling around the band's heads at this point: "Living on an Island," with its acoustic wash and mournful melody…

Mike Oldfield was back into the extended composition game with Five Miles Out, continuing the "Taurus" series with the mammoth "Taurus II," an entertaining enough romp with references to Irish music, brass bands and Oldfield's beloved Morris. The true standout, though, was the title track, a paean to flying in bad weather that could easily double for Oldfield's feelings about the sort of monumental critical drubbing he was accustomed to receiving. "Family Man" became a huge worldwide hit for Hall & Oates.

Recorded in the midst of Robert Smith's tenuous tenure with Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Top is arguably the most hedonistic record the Cure ever produced. Essentially Smith and Lol Tolhurst working with studio musicians (this being the period when the Cure's lineup was never assured), it's an album obviously recorded under stress, drink, and drugs. More wildly experimental musically than anything before it, it laid the foundations for the Cure's pattern of unpigeonholable albums that were to erase their reputation built by Pornography and eventually culminating in Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. That said, it's still very much a Cure record. Heavy on the percussion and quaint keyboard effects that were so big in the '80s, the melodies ("The Caterpillar," "Shake Dog Shake") are unmistakably Robert Smith…

After recording one of their darkest albums, 1984's The Top, the Cure regrouped and shuffled their lineup, which changed their musical direction rather radically. While the band always had a pop element in their sound and even recorded one of the lightest songs of the '80s, "The Lovecats," The Head on the Door is where they become a hitmaking machine. The shiny, sleek production and laser-sharp melodies of "Inbetween Days" and "Close to Me" helped them become modern rock radio staples and the inspired videos had them in heavy rotation on MTV. The rest of the record didn't suffer for hooks and inventive arrangements either, making even the gloomiest songs like "Screw" and "Kyoto Song" sound radio-ready, and the inventive arrangements…