Music geeks are obsessed with the new. New artists, new songs, new albums from familiar artists. The sense of discovering something new is a big part of the fandom fun.
While I've certainly enjoyed a lot of new (to me) music this year, I find myself listening over and over again to three albums I did not expect to spend much time with. In fact, I didn't even know they were coming out, and I'm the kind of dork who pays attention to articles about "The Most Anticipated New Releases of Next Year!" They're albums that have little reason to exist, save for the artists feeling the need to create. And in an age when most reunions from old favorites are cynical cash grabs, these low-key comebacks are kind of refreshing.
All three bands' biggest days are behind them. WAY behind them, like the '80s and '90s. And their respective successes came at wildly different levels.
TEARS FOR FEARS is certainly the most famous, and their 2022 release The Tipping Point is easily one of my favorite albums of the year. If you're not familiar with the band's '80s heyday — first as synth-pop newcomers, then as chart-topping pop stars — you've certainly heard their hits "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and "Shout" on a movie trailer (or a thousand of them).
The Tipping Point is Tears for Fears' first album in 18 years, and second since Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith reunited after nine years apart. Most of the world wasn't waiting for a new Tears for Fears album. But the death of Orzabal's wife in 2017 and the pandemic pushed the two musical partners together again to create The Tipping Point. It sounds nothing like their huge hits, and it's probably the best album of their career. Bombastic anthems of their early days have evolved into intricately produced pop mini-symphonies full of lush strings, delicate horns and as many acoustic guitars as synthesizers. And while their lyrical subject matter has never been exactly cheerful, Orzabal and Smith deliver shards of hope among songs contemplating loss and aging. It's heavy emotionally, but all delivered with a joyful touch that bears repeat listening.
The audience waiting for a new URGE OVERKILL album in 2022 is even smaller. The Chicago band's ironically glammy image and power-pop riffs struck a chord in indie-rock circles in the early '90s, and they had a bonafide hit with a cover of Neil Diamond's "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.
Urge Overkill always seemed on the cusp of stardom that never came — they opened for Nirvana's Nevermind tour and Pearl Jam's Vs. tour — and broke up in 1995. They released a little-heard album in 2011, and this year dropped another, Oui, that trades in the same guitar-forward approach as the old days. It's good-time rock delivered in not-a-very-good-time times.
The least likely comeback in my rotation comes courtesy of THE RAVE-UPS, a Los Angeles crew who helped pioneer the twangy "cowpunk" genre (think X or the Blasters) in the late '80s before singer Jimmer Podrasky left the band in 1990 to raise his son. They were another band who almost made it big — they were the bar band in Pretty in Pink — and the reunion of the original members for this year's Tomorrow album was awaited by exactly no one. But I sure was excited when I heard about it, and raced to pick up the new set. Just as I found their tunes on old albums like Town + Country to be timeless gems, the new songs sound incredibly fresh — and like they could have released them right after their last album came out 32 years ago. ♦
