The Rise & Fall

Seems like I was totally unaware of anything Madness put out aside from the chorus of Our House. It really was a cool album to listen to; I enjoyed the odd and quirky nature of the songs but felt they were still pretty accessible.

bauhaus
in the middle of baustreet

I am fed up with this new wave crap

Fine.

When the wiki summary said ska, I was like oh god, I can't stand ska. But I guess in the early 80s ska meant something different than in the 90s. But ya still, this was just ok, 80s pop with some variety. I knew Our House before this.

Fun little album. A bit more variety in tempo and style and I would give it four stars but It’s not quite there for me.

Inoffensive to the ears, even if that one song gets played to death on 80s radio stations while the rest of the album gets ignored. Still white guy ska, though. You're never going to find me listening to this on purpose.

2.15

What a weird album. Feels really experimental, and kinda all over the place genre wise, but manages to stay consistent in tone/sound throughout. When Our House came up I was shocked since I was not expecting to recognize anything on this. And honestly, the fact that anything on this album broke through and became a hit is insane to me considering how much this album just does not care whether it's accessible or not.

Overally, enjoyed the album for what it was, but it was kinda silly a lot of the time and generally sits in a style that I find hard to take seriously I guess. A lot of dated sounding bass and instrumentals that while they don't sound dated in the context of the songs (In fact, they manage to make those sounds come off as really unique and fresh), it's tough for me to separate them out from other music I hear those sounds in and are extremely dated/cheesy themselves.

Argh, Madness, as a child in the UK in the 80s, this name is enough to elicit a primal reaction. It wasn't cool then, it's not cool now, and "Our House" is a poor cover of the CSNY classic, doesn't even use the same words or tempo...

So happy to see some ska representation on this list. This album is super cool. It definitely has a lot of ska, but also ventures far into a lot of other territory. I dig how dark it is too. Definitely something I need to pick up on wax eventually.

Es curioso como un álbum que califican como "experimental" en wikipedia no me lo haya parecido tanto. Interesante para disfrutar de la banda que mejor aprovechó comercialmente la música Ska. Canciones buenas como Blue Skinned Beast, Primrose Hill, Are You Coming (with Me) o Madness (Is All In the Mind). Piano, percusiones, saxo, bastante entretenido musicalmente.
Y por supuesto la mítica Our House.