Frankie Goes To Hollywood: "Welcome To The Pleasuredome" (1984)

Less an extended dance track than a fully-fledged nightclub topography, “Welcome To The Pleasuredome” is FGTH’s magnum opus – a declaration of pleasure and a declaration of intent that would make everything else in their career feel anticlimactic. Opening with ambient jungle noise, it proceeds from a four-to-the-floor dance number based on “Kubla Khan” to a cosmic electronic landscape in which anything and everything feels ejaculatory – shooting stars, laser beams, supernovas – while FGTH conjure up every possible synthetic bleep and gurgle they can think of, in search of ever new and more bizarre ways to achieve or express orgasm. In large part, that’s due to the presence of producer Trevor Horn – it’s his masterpiece as much as FGTH’s, as his efforts to rival Coleridge’s visionary, drug-induced landscapes outclass anything in his own solo career for sheer flamboyance and audacity. It’s not surprising, then, that the song should lend its name to the album, but what is perhaps surprising is that it is the first track on Welcome To The Pleasuredome, with the exception of a short instrumental prologue ("The World is My Oyster"). That would make any album feel anticlimactic, let alone a double album that’s devolves into standards and covers in its second half. But perhaps that’s in keeping with FGTH’s pleasure principle too – the album has no qualms about blowing its load too soon, perhaps because the apparently limitless electronic inventions of the title track seem to offer a surrogate multiple orgasm that sustains you through a series of covers that feel more comically perfunctory as they go, culminating with one of the weirdest covers of Springsteen committed to posterity (and that’s including the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of “The Last to Die” in 2013). In fact the whole album has a surrogate, prosthetic kink to it – it is like a nightclub you can bring into your bedroom, music that bridges that gap between the dance floor and the person you escort home from it, a sex toy crafted out of synthesizers. “Relax,” the first single from Welcome To The Pleasuredome – and the first of FGTH’s career – was made famous by its inclusion in Brian de Palma’s Body Double, but that’s only because even De Palma could never find a way to visualise the sublime vistas glimpsed here, let alone the architecture of orgasm that FGTH and Trevor Horn erect and re-erect with such decadent abandon.

David Lynch: "Are You Sure?" (2013)

Drawn from the pockets of white noise that lurk around the fringes of Lynch’s fantasies, 2011’s Crazy Clown Time was so anxious to shock, alienate and confound that it was easy to forget that Lynch is an extraordinarily accomplished, melancholy songwriter in his own right. Released two years later, The Big Dream plays more as a showcase for that songcraft, going so far as to include a cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” among its many rambles and reveries. It’s fascinating to hear Lynch reimagine Dylan’s tableau as one of his own, just as it’s startling to hear the album reconstitute the blues-and-ballad structures that were grungily, even industrially, eviscerated on Crazy Clown Time. In fact, it often feels as if that exercise in weirdness was merely the precondition for returning to a stranger normality, a normality that climaxes on The Big Dream’s final track, “Are You Sure?” For the first time in his recent output, Lynch fully embraces the guitar pedals and lush feedback that haunted his music of the late 80s and early 90s – you can tell, immediately, that we’re back in the presence of the musician who composed Floating Into The Night and The Voice of Love with Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. By the same token, Lynch’s weird, hollowed out voice feels further from a gimmick than at any point on his last two albums – it almost ruins the song, only to make it all the more haunting, echoing Cruise in much the same way as she echoed herself on 2002’s The Art of Being a Girl, her own late reflection on Twin Peaks’ soundscapes. That Lynchian voice always works best when paired with naïve beauty, lyrics and sentiments that would seem simplistic in any other context – and  “Are You Sure?” is more haiku than song, moving between a few concrete images before settling on a note of indeterminate, inchoate longing that sets the whole album aquiver behind it. Like listening to the Twin Peaks theme after transcendental meditation, it’s familiar and unfamiliar, more itself than it ever was – and that’s the very essence of Lynch’s lyricism, perfect for the last track of an album.

The Cure: "Plainsong" (1989)

In the mid-80s, the Cure released three of the most musically varied and experimental albums of their career. In place of the monochromatic murk of the Death trilogy, The Top, The Head On The Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me often seemed to be angling for a sound that was more anarchic, freewheeling and, ultimately, joyous than what had come before. In some ways, those aspirations would be fulfilled by the Cure’s early 90s albums, especially Wish and Wild Mood Swings, which were similarly cluttered and variegated in tone. But they were momentarily folded back into murk for Disintegration, a high water mark in the Cure’s career. And, as the opening track on Disintegration, “Plainsong” feels like a statement of purpose. Many of the murky signatures are still there – vocals that bleed into guitars, monumental organ swells and unresolved chords that seem to leave the song jutting over the precipice that gradually comes into view as the rest of the album. But it’s all overlaid with a sparkling theatricality that’s somehow even more pessimistic than the morbid murk of the Death trilogy – if this is the sound of Robert Smith finally breaking the surface of the water, it’s only to witness just how wide and glittering the waste that surrounds him actually is. He may have saved himself from drowning, but he’s surfaced to the most desolately beautiful ocean imaginable, and that’s very much the tone of the album, which eschews the crypts, apses and transepts of the earlier Cure for something like the full cathedral. Once, plainsong may have been a way  of communing with  that sacred space, but Smith’s feels excommunicated from the very structure it was supposed to adorn – it’s a missive from the deepest, darkest exile, a series of chords and key changes with only the remotest, frostiest memory of the home they once had.