10 Amazing '80s Bands That Everyone Forgot About
2. A.R. Kane
A jewel in the crown of legendary indie label Rough Trade, A.R. Kane’s late ‘80s success has been enormously influential for dream-and-noise-pop practitioners in the years since, but has translated to little in the way of mass cultural memory.
It’s not hard to see why; they did what they want, and what they wanted to do was often very weird. After two excellent EPs, their first album proper, 69, was easy enough to latch onto - stark, often trippy avant-pop, with songs like the paranoid “Baby Milk Snatcher” showcasing the band at their melodic but challenging best.
Follow up “i” goes wilder still. A band uninterested in boundaries, it throws away the formula and jumps through proto-trip hop and sinister dub for a long, challenging, but rewarding listen. Their swansong, New Clear Child, is worth a spin but it’s clear to see the duo of Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala pulling in separate directions.
The likes of Massive Attack, Portishead, and Lush have pulled plenty from A.R. Kane’s bag of tricks, and their decades-old albums still sound utterly contemporary, and even futuristic, albeit totally dystopian.