Which of the following is your favourite album?

thanks for all those great recommendations. i listened to about 3 songs of the slits on the laptop last night and wasn't impressed. to me it sounded like an uninspired mess. whereas the pop group album sounded like an exciting mess. i don't know all this post-punk stuff too well. in theory i am attracted to it but in practice i often have problems to like it.

from the ones you mention i am especially intrigued about:

• the b-52s (i have a best of which didn't impress me at all. i am very much looking forward to your post though.)
• talking heads (i like that band a lot. my fave is the live the name of this band is th. recently i got remain in light and was very much disappointed. as the mix of funk and world sounded extremely dated.)
• eno et al. (cluster i like a lot)
• art bears (i know only from hear-say)
• throbbing gristle (ditto)
• fripp (what i heard of him i liked)
• pil (are you referring to metal box? i don't really know it but my problem with pil is that i can't get past rotten's voice)

concerning jarrett/joy div you are probably right. i have one of those in mind and i should have concentrated on one album for each. but all four choices are pretty great in their own right.

... between Unknown Pleasures and 154. I gave my vote to 154 because I figured everyone else would be voting for Unknown Pleasures (I was wrong), and Wire's third album should be heard by more people, even if only for "Map Ref".

Anyway, a classic, era-defining album like Unknown Pleasures really belongs in a league of its own, away from other albums, maybe in a list of important contemporaneous works of art regardless of what medium. If not for staying up all night listening to that album the night before my exams, I would probably be a professor of Anglo-Saxon Literature by now.

i listened to 154 last night for the first time. and i loved it immediately. it does not seem to be typical for wire as i remember knowing them. basically from the on returning comp. the songs are quite long and the album has a flow. it is somewhere in between the early short post-punk songs (which sometimes annoy me) and dark wave or however you call what the cure and joy div were doing at the same time.

i love your personal anecdote on unknown pleasures. that's what great music should do. change your life. i hope you didn't regret ending up as a librarian. in my teens that used to be one of my dream jobs. i discovered joy div too late in my life to make them change it.

I had 154 on vinyl "many moons ago" and was pleased to find it on CD a couple of years ago. Amazingly, as soon as I heard the first track again, I could remember all the other tunes and the order they came in -- like you say, the album has a definite flow.

Don't know if you ever checked out an album called Commercial Suicide; by Wire's singer Colin Newman. It's a favourite of mine from the mid-80's. You can see the similarity with Wire in some places, though maybe the album is an acquired taste for some - there are, for instance, no drums at all on the album, and the sound in general is pretty uncompromising, though I still prefer it to the stuff that Wire brought out in the mid-80s when they reformed.