My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (3) The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses

[This is the eighth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

The Stone Roses arrived on the international scene fully formed with their eponymous 1989 debut, a vast and outrageously confident album befitting a band that had already been touring for nearly 6 years. Through a complex series of contract disputes and interpersonal conflicts, the band would ultimately come to stand as the forebears not only of the figureheads of a second British Invasion, but also of those groups’ tendency to fizzle out just as they reached their peak. The thin drums and trebly basslines of The Stone Roses anchor in 1989 music that borrows liberally from very nearly everything preceding it – including, almost as if to make a point, Renaissance balladry on “Elizabeth My Dear.” The guitar-dominated proceedings certainly owe a great deal to The Smiths, an influence which may also have unlocked such unabashedly pretty moments as the chiming “Waterfall.” Much has been made of the absence of overt electronica on The Stone Roses, given band’s place within the drug- and dance-centric Madchester scene. If it isn’t quite a party album, though, it’s a relentlessly kinetic one thanks to its powerful rhythm section and swaggering frontman. The latter does ultimately steal the show, singing “I Wanna Be Adored” and “I Am the Resurrection” with absolute conviction, and either no awareness of or no concern for the disconnect. The effect is something of a magic trick, lending plausibility to The Stone Roses as a miraculous flash in the pan arriving at the precipice of the 1980s to encapsulate the decade, rather than the slow brew it really was. It was perfectly appropriate that the band’s next act was effectively to disappear.