Customer Reviews

Ministry of Sound: Anthems Electronic 80's

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Ok no wordiness this time round! In bried this compilation is quite simply outstanding! Why? 1. Cost; it's very cheap for a 3cd quality 80s album. 2. Sound Quality; to my ear the tracks are all digitally remastered! The songs are completely unmixed with a 2 second gap between each of them. They seem to all be either radio versions or 7"ers. 3. The tracks' rarity; a lot of these tracks are nigh impossible to find elsewhere never mind on compact disc. 4. Creative audacity ; You can tell whoever put this together really loved and understood 80s electro, it's track combination is bold, yes, it crosses over into new wave and a bit of pop but as a whole it works! Yet another gem of a release from MOS! If you are a fan of 80s electro you quite simply must have this Every other record label looks to these guys for a reason: They're the best in the business!

OK, the point here is that there isn't going to be a collection of 80's electronic anthems that everyone will be happy about. I love that "Fade to Gray" is on here as well as some obscure items, but I could have done with some obscure Depeche Mode song, and something by Toyah Wilcox would have been nice. She isn't completely electronic but was heavily influenced by such in the 80's.

If you want a good introduction to great music that WASN'T playing on the radio in the 80's then check this out. You can't be disappointed.

I loved '80's music and it produced lots of my favorite songs but I've never heard of half the songs on these CD's and never heard of lots of the artists either. Where did they get them from?

As a fan of many styles of electronic music, from psytrance to dub to ambient to pop, and having recently rediscovered how much I like 80s music, I was disappointed with many of the tracks here. Though electronic music in the 80s was still in its infancy, many musicians were nevertheless able to make the most of it to craft great songs, and put into them that special characteristic 80s vibe that somehow combines synthetic coldness with emotional warmth; playfulness and optimism with a lyrical melancholy. Those songs have stood the test of time and still have integrity despite their technological shortcomings, and some of them are here, such as Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls", Johnny Hates Jazz's "Shattered Dreams" or Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy".

But many other tracks just sound too much like the musicians were still trying to figure out how to get the most out of the electronic form and, like a kid fooling around on his first Yamaha keyboard, were a bit too infatuated with the new technology to know how to use it tastefully. A lot of the tracks feel like little more than novelties, or experiments that - while they might have sounded innovative at the time - just sound embarrassingly quaint today, not to mention horribly tinny.

I think you probably need very particular tastes and/or a keen interest in pop music history to really get the most from this compilation. I think most people will end up finding a lot of the tracks primitive or grating, and will end up skipping many of them, for much the same reason that relatively few people listen to jazz from the 1910s or classical music from the 1200s.