8. Carpenter Brut - "Leather Terror"

You know when you come to the end of a record, and you find yourself trying to process what the heck you have just listened to, but you know that you need to go straight back in again? Well, that’s exactly how I felt my first three rounds with “Leather Terror”. Of all the records on this list, this is the one that has risen furthest through the medium of repeat listens. My initial inclination was this was a lightweight poppy affair that wore its 80’s obsession on its oversized T-shirt.

But then I started to notice the anarchistic flourishes and the dashes of pure darkness. If this is a pop album, then it is one that is both highly self-aware and also gloriously perverted. This is pop with the sugar replaced by mind-altering substances. It plays with pop, and it knows what good pop is, but it also has the ability to completely subvert it. It presents itself as though butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth, but while you are distracted by its delicious catchiness, it is busy ransacking your drawers and defecating on your carpet. 

And that I think is my overall impression. A glorious subversion of what we think synth-drenched pop should be. It gives the allure of being lightweight and imbecilic when actually it has a PhD in psychology from Oxford. It seduces you with wanton lust and then hits you with a flurry of barbed-wire kisses. It is a clever, cunning and emotionally mature record that masquerades as something much flimsier and disposable. A mass of ever-shifting contradictions, what though does stay constant is the fact that it is an utter work of genius.