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The best 80s album was released by a mysterious man that no one knows about...

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Sean*O

Member
This record meets none of the criteria to be called the greatest album of a decade.. let alone the fucking 80s.
 

vikki

Member
Reminds me of Paul Dano

lewis-lamour.jpg
paul_dano_a_l.jpg
 

jorgeton

Member
Huh. Really interesting story. The whole album is up on Spotify. It's pretty good rainy day music.

It sounds a lot like Nick Drake, except with cheap synths all over the place.
 

Sol..

I am Wayne Brady.
Not a fan, but I can see how it would find an audience now rather than back in the 80s even with the crazy story.
 
Lol I knew Ed would be the dude that shot the cover. He did so many covers in the 80's and 90's. If you guys ever get a chance to meet him I say do it. Really nice man.
 
I'd be a little more generous towards this album if you didn't claim it was the greatest album of the 1980s. But it's honestly somewhat boring. When I was listening to the song in the OP all I could think of was albums that were way better.
 

suedester

Banned
Listened to this album a few times now. It really is very good indeed. If you like your slow melancholic Nick Drake type music you will love this. Shame the OP ruined any potential discussion of the album with the thread title but there you go.
 

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
Uh, OP, that was some guy mumbling over church piano music. That was not good man. That's actually really, really bad.

What are the criteria?

One should probably begin with it being good.

Lewis is a great find, and anyone that collects vinyl knows that there is this whole other world of amazing music just waiting to be found from the 80's and beyond.

I found an album called Spectral Display from 1982. Great stuff.

Best song is "It Takes A Muscle To Fall In Love": http://youtu.be/a1CEoVWKKPU (just let the synths hit)

And "You Don't Know", which I uploaded myself since it didn't seem to exist anywhere else: http://youtu.be/zh4T4nIRTec

Now we're getting somewhere, what else have you got?
 

kaiju

Member
Now we're getting somewhere, what else have you got?

I uploaded a few more songs that weren't on youtube, check them out:

Paris France Transit - Ego

Xynn - Space/Dreaming Again

Check out the Daft Punk sound at 5:00.

More Xynn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0LszL8c6I8

And if you like 70's Space-Funk, this is a must: Automatic Man - My Pearl

This is a great spacey instrumental, almost a crime it wasn't on youtube previously:

To Neto - Zuzu

And another instrumental I uploaded - Richard Vimal - Septentrion

One more: Laza Ristovski - Domina II

Sorry to derail thread, we might just need an obscure vinyl thread up in here!
 
YouTube uploads

Nice post, looking forward to going through these when I'm in front of the computer.

Been listening to Lewis for almost a year now and it never occurred to me that there may be some hoaxing going on here. Regardless, great album and glad to see it finding a wider audience.
 
It's funny cuz in the 80s this would have been the Windham Hill shit your aunt listened to, but today this guy's an ambient indie master.
 

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
Sorry to derail thread, we might just need an obscure vinyl thread up in here!
It seems you've got the material to start one, sounds like a good idea.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Its the internet, so this is probably just marketing bullshit.

Its probably just some regular album recorded fairly recently that they pushed as "by a mysterious dude from the 80s no one can find" to add hype to it on Pitchfork and such.
 
Gonna have to disagree with you on best 80s album there OP:

Huey_Lewis_%26_the_News_-_Sports.jpg


Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
 

kaiju

Member
Its the internet, so this is probably just marketing bullshit.

Its probably just some regular album recorded fairly recently that they pushed as "by a mysterious dude from the 80s no one can find" to add hype to it on Pitchfork and such.

I see where your coming from, but you're wrong on this one. I saw this album in record store bins as far back as the 90's. It's legit.
 
Gonna have to disagree with you on best 80s album there OP:

Huey_Lewis_%26_the_News_-_Sports.jpg


Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.

Well done, sir.
 

Lijik

Member
The earliest I can find of this album on the internet is someone saying they owned it back in 2010, predating the youtube uploads by a few months, the user has regularly used the site since 2008 and has taken the time to list almost 4,000 albums as being in their collection

If the whole thing is a hoax, thats commitment.
Aspects to the story do sound fishy as hell though. "He went and recorded more music under a different name... that we wont tell you for some reason!"
 

Machine

Member
I see where your coming from, but you're wrong on this one. I saw this album in record store bins as far back as the 90's. It's legit.

If it's real, it sounds like it was a vanity pressing. Probably not more than a couple hundred in existence. Seems a little obscure to be seeing in record store bins on even an infrequent basis.
 

C4Lukins

Junior Member
Wow I really hate Pitchfork. They took some obscure album and created some bull shit mythology behind it, and now it is a thing.
 
Gonna have to disagree with you on best 80s album there OP:

Huey_Lewis_%26_the_News_-_Sports.jpg


Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.

h258B0880
 

Huey_Lewis_%26_The_News_Fore!_CD_cover.JPG


In '87, Huey released this, "Fore!": their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip to be Square"; a song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself!
 

Cosmic Bus

pristine morning snow
Wow I really hate Pitchfork. They took some obscure album and created some bull shit mythology behind it, and now it is a thing.

??

This isn't Pitchfork, it's been a project the dudes at Light in the Attic and Numero worked on for years - which, for what it's worth, are probably the two most respected labels who deal almost exclusively with rescuing lost/rare music and giving these artists well-deserved recognition decades after the fact.

The backstory isn't exactly comprised of anything that unusual for the time period - it's pretty perfect, really - but even if it's not entirely factual, who cares? It'd be very out of character for this label, for one thing, but at the end of the day it's just some interesting copy. The important part is that they're getting music into the hands of people (me included!) who've been interested in having it for a while now without having to drop hundreds on an OG copy on ebay.

Inherent internet cynicism is the only "thing" that's worth griping about here.
 

amnesiac

Member
He's back

DLDWUV1.jpg



From Light in the Attic:

Ok. Well now that the cat is out of the bag, I will shed a little light to wet the tastebuds... A Canadian digger turned a copy of this up 2 months ago and sold it to Light in the Attic. In a great irony, it was the same guy who we asked to go to the studio in Vancouver to ask about the recordings done there in the mid '00s. In an even greater irony, he found the record in his storage unit just thumbing through the refuse of some old buys. Such is life. The copy currently on eBay landed at THE SAME record store that Aaron bought his copies from years ago. It has been confirmed as having been recorded in Calgary, despite the address on the back for R.A.W. Corp which is actually a PO Box at a mailboxes etcetera type place in Beverly Hills.

The label had me come in and I found the disc under the coffee table, while Matt was on the phone. I initially thought it was a total hoax, but they handed me a CD-R and listening to it on the ride home I was pretty blown away. It's a great follow-up to an incredible record, and is decidedly even more personal and strange. The unintentional nods to Badalamenti on the first disc take a plunge into deep red room turf on "Romantic Times" and in some ways he feels like a necromancer waiting to make an appearance on that vaunted show. 5 years before it aired. I'll save the rest for the liner notes. Suffice to say, it's a doozy, and for me a future big one in the real people / twilight zone camp.

Thanks, Dwayne and Cosmic Bus
 

Valhelm

contribute something
At least now we have a last name. How hard can it be to search Canadian census records and phonebooks for this guy?
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I see where your coming from, but you're wrong on this one. I saw this album in record store bins as far back as the 90's. It's legit.

You saw it in record store bins, yet nobody know what it was until like three months ago? Still guessing its some kind of marketing ploy.
 

amnesiac

Member
You saw it in record store bins, yet nobody know what it was until like three months ago? Still guessing its some kind of marketing ploy.

The fact that the second one shows up right after the first one comes out is one hell of a coincidence. If it's actually a modern guy making this music that would be awesome.
 

DiscoJon

Banned
Subscribed to this thread. I'm thinking I might drive down to Seattle tomorrow to see if I can get a vinyl copy of L'Amour from the Light in the Attic store.
 
Lewis is a great find, and anyone that collects vinyl knows that there is this whole other world of amazing music just waiting to be found from the 80's and beyond.

I found an album called Spectral Display from 1982. Great stuff.

Best song is "It Takes A Muscle To Fall In Love": http://youtu.be/a1CEoVWKKPU (just let the synths hit)

And "You Don't Know", which I uploaded myself since it didn't seem to exist anywhere else: http://youtu.be/zh4T4nIRTec

Wow this shit is good. People, don't skip this
 
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