INXS - The Album thread

There seems to be interest in the band, with several threads of what if, and best albums and such coming to life around the place recently, so I thought it may be a good time to look back at one of Australia's most popular pop/rock musical exports.

I have most of the bands albums, but I am most familiar with the Underneath the Colours through to Kick albums and really look forward to trying out the stuff I am unfamiliar with, and looking more closely at the albums I grew up with. I hope that some folks will join me on a journey through the bands career, with all the highs and lows that the journey will involve.

I generally post an album, and then we roll through the songs one by one. This process will go from Monday to Saturday, and on Sunday I have other commitments which gives anyone who is busy a chance to catch up.
Each Saturday I will post a thread guide which will take you straight to the songs and albums, because to me that is what this type of thread is all about, and later in the thread, if folks are posting a lot, it becomes easier to go back to things you may want to check out, or relook at.

Today I am just throwing out a post to let people know we are doing this.
Tomorrow I will roll out a proper intro to the band, and the day after we will be underway.

Please stay where we are at in the discussion, so that folks don't lose track of what we are talking about. If you come along later, please feel free to talk about things we have already looked at.

So I look forward to running through the INXS catalog and hope some of you will come along for the ride. I don't pretend to be an expert on the band, and I know there will be some experts on the forum, and look forward to learning about the ins and outs of the band with you all.

Cheers
Mark

 

INXS early on

 

This is getting way head of the game but I know you' d be fascinated to know I was playing ' Kick ' just last night.... and enjoyed it.

 

( wind blowing.... tumbleweeds rolling by)

 

Heh...they look like Dexy's.

 

Listen Like Thieves is an all-time fave of mine. I still remember, like it was yesterday, the moment I first heard that cacophonous opening to "What You Need" on the radio. I literally said to myself something like: finally something new under the sun! That smash opening and the horns mixed into the song, etc. I dug the less inventive earlier stuff like Shabooh Shoobah but this was something else altogether sobering...like a slap in the face!

 

I love all the albums through 'Welcome to Wherever You Are'. I agree with mbrownp1, that intro to 'What You Need' was like someone kicking the door down.

The first 2 albums have such a different sound than the rest of the catalog. It's like a combination of ska/pop/punk/new wave... all being played at an Aussie beach party. Michael hadn't found his voice yet but the songs are all very fun. Andrew's keyboards take center stage on lots of the early songs, with guitars being more for texture. Everything would change (no pun) on Shabooh Shoobah.

 

I kinda struggle to get into the albums before Listen Like Thieves. They stumbled on a couple of solid singles before that, but that was the first time their songwriting really gelled for me.

 

Mark, once again I admire your efforts here on SHF in creating yet another thread on another great act. I take it now that you plan to do a thread on every band that's ever existed? (LOL). Seriously, this looks like it'll be a fun journey through the INXS discography. I also look forward to any discussions involving Australian, UK and US fans' first impressions of the group. Thinking back, I had forgotten how huge they were here in the States in 1987-90.

I'm unfamiliar with their early records (save the excellent "One Thing" single), but I love Listen Like Thieves and Kick, while X and Welcome To Wherever You Are produced some brilliant singles as well. I played Thieves and Kick for the first time in many years just a few months ago, and was amazed at how well they hold up. Best wishes for this thread and here's to this band's great music...

 

Cheers mate.
It's all a bit of fun.
I'm looking forward to it. Hope to see you along the journey

 

Listen Like Thieves, Kick and Welcome to Wherever You Are, top class albums for me. I agree that their consistency was sporadic up till Thieves but The One Thing, Original Sin, Burn For You and Dont Change are all as good as the best on those albums. The only thing that vexes me is that at their height, they turned in the disappointing X but I think they were at their best when hungry.

 

I'm totally in! I'm a huge fan of their first eight albums.

 

I like X, and it did well, but in hindsight yeah, I think it cost them to take that long between records and then release Kick Part II, which like most sequels, wasn't as good as the first one. I've never really gotten a good idea on whether X was the record company pushing for a similar-sounding follow-up, or the band not sure of their direction and deciding to play it safe. I've always thought if they had released Welcome in 1990 instead of 1992 and beat U2 at the reinvention game, their 90's arc might've been very different.

 

I'm a Shabooh/Swing/Thieves kinda guy.

 

So, I familiarized with the albums all sort of at once, after giving my wife the 2011 CD boxed set. I had really only listened to singles tracks before that. I’m sure that skews my perceptions compared with anyone who followed the band contemporaneously and experienced each album as the follow-up to the previous album, etc. I’ll probably go through the effort of listening along on this one, which should be fun!

If I’m going to put one of these albums on to play through, I tend to reach for Listen Like Thieves. They are all good, but for me that one hits a sweet spot between having standout tracks while also hanging together as an album.

 

INXS are probably my favourite band of all time. From the moment I heard Heaven Sent in July 1992, I knew they were special. So I look forward to contributing to this thread and analyzing each track. And considering I enjoy 99% of everything they've ever released, it will be interesting to see just how objective I can be when rating each song...

 

I sincerely look forward to your input mate

 

Love that someone discovered them during that era. That's like how I got seriously into U2 as a 15 year old when Pop and "Discotheque" came out. INXS was a later find for me, but Welcome is my favorite album of theirs.

 

Thanks to my older brother, the band became one of my instant favorites. Listen Like Thieves, Kick, X and Welcome, were albums I had memorized front to back during my youth. Awesome and intriguing band. I definitely look forward to this thread.

 

Cool. Then we're both similar in age...

I remember MuchMusic (a Canadian music video channel) premiering Heaven Sent on their Hostess Sneak Previews show and being blown away at how fantastic the song was. And then I bought the WTWYA cassette on the day of release & immediately fell in love with it. And consequently, I became a hard-core fan almost overnight, buying everything with INXS written on it. And to this day, my love for that album (definitely their masterpiece) and INXS' music overall, hasn't diminished one bit...

 

You're probably a couple years older than me. By the time I started really paying attention to what was going on, it was probably late '92 or '93, and at least in the States, that INXS album had already come and gone by that point. I doubt I heard a single song from it until the early 2000's when I bought the album for $2 on a whim at a local used shop. But it got me right away.

 

This should be an entertaining thread. INXS is a rare band where I actually enjoy the remixes / extended versions / b-sides over a majority of the album cuts. Looking forward to gaining a deeper appreciation of the albums I like and reassessing my opinions on the albums I didn't...

Best of luck!

 

Just gushing over Shabooh Shoobah, The Swing, and Listen Like Thieves over the past two days. I can't decide which one I like best, but all three are AKNF.

 

They're my three favourites ... at this stage at least anyway