Dirty Mind Review

This is the pivot. The demos were never meant to be the album, and releasing them as they were is the best decision anyone involved made, because the roughness is the sound. A cheap synthesiser doing bass and lead, a drum machine, a guitar recorded dry, and a voice moving between a shout and a falsetto in the same bar. The subject matter went several steps past what radio would accept, and the point is not shock value but the flatness of the delivery: he sings about incest, about a woman getting married to someone else that afternoon, about oral sex, in exactly the tone he uses for anything else.

When You Were Mine is the great one, a jealous pop song with a melody that half of new wave spent the next four years trying to write. Uptown builds a whole imagined city. Thirty minutes, no ballads, no fat, and the first record that sounds like nobody else on earth.