That XTC would probably have been my #1 for this year. Great call, mcap!
Since you mentioned that one already, I'm gonna lay out a couple of SST beauts:


Major label debut from the Hüskers. No, it's not quite as fierce-sounding as their SST releases. Yes, it's shinier. But you simply cannot argue with songs as strong as "Don't Want to Know if You're Lonely", "Sorry Somehow", and "Hardly Getting Over It".

There are some pretty great albums from this year and this is definitely one of them.

Also:

The debut of the post-Minutemen Watt/Hurley project. Ragin' is not the genius that the Minutemen were. It's more pop and less jazz. Less adventurous, to be sure. fIREHOSE would go on to make better records, but this one has its own pleasures and its own rewards.

Right up there with old Pryor albums in terms of shit that got passed around on unmarked cassette tapes:

That cover is insane. Marquis isn't sagging his jeans - he's pulling them down in a defacto "dis soff" moment. Also, I believe Luke has on a chef's toque pulled back ala a beret, and nothing ever beats "trying to be tight yet coming off hood" like emblazoning words on your 1985 Jeep Cherokee.

Also, the back of that Jeep was full of cash that he was driving over to Coral Gables. And Jimmy Johnson was riding shotgun and hot out moments before they took the picture.

great call

I second XTC, Steve Earle, Church and Smithereens.

Also...

The Godfathers - Hit by Hit
Talk Talk - The Colour of Spring

I think the albums from '86 that have aged the best for me are Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians "Element of Light," Billy Bragg "Talking to the Taxman about Poetry," and the two Costello Albums "King of America" & "Blood & Chocolate." I also like the Smiths - The Queen is Dead, The Church - the Blurred Crusade, the Feelies and the Smithereens among things already mentioned.

As has been said, it was really a relatively bad year though. Not only that but a lot of artists that I really dug at the time were starting to lose their appeal to me. Those Costello albums were the last things he put out that I liked for a long time. Life's Rich Pagaent was the last REM I liked and Skylarking was the beginning of the end for XTC for me.

I played the crap out of that Love & Rockets album at the time but I really don't care if I ever hear it again.

It's not the classic that their debut is. Nor is it the dark, brooding brilliance of the follow-up. Enlisting producer, former Talking Head Jerry Harrison, their third album is the Femmes taking their first real shot at the mainstream. No, in terms of record sales, it was not a success, but the music is still pretty damn good, nonetheless. "I Held Her in My Arms" is a good a pop song as was released in 1986, with a great horn chart. Too bad it didn't make the charts. Front-to-back, this is nothing but pure fun. Yeah, it's still subversive, only a bit more subtlely so. Guess that makes it even more subversive.

I like this a lot. Maybe more than Fegmania.

I think Blood & Chocolate is EC's best album post-Get Happy!!. I like it a lot more than King of America.

Awesome guys. Posting a ton I don't have, look forward to get most of it.

I'm not posting one yet, because I'm at work, but I wanted to just throw out there that "Graceland" came out in 1986 and even though it's maligned by a lot of people and I'm sure that a lot of people here don't like it, I think it's one of the best pop albums ever and really one of my most listened to albums, period. Love it to death, all the corniness, exploitation, everything.

But keep em coming, great start and really interested in some of these that I don't know.

I'd say Element of Light is my favorite Robin Hitchcock as well as far as studio albums go. Oddly enough though, my overall favorite is the odds and ends collection, Invisible Hitchcock, also released in 1986.

Coming from someone who turned me on to Joe Pisapia, I never would've imagined this.

I felt the same way 25 years ago.

I also second :
The Smiths
Robin Hitchcock
Talk Talk
Elvis C.

I like Skylarking, but I sort of agree with billy g. I really don't like the direction they headed in from there on, and I hear some of that on that album as well as it just being a departure from a lot of things I like about their early stuff.

I second the nod to Graceland, and don't give a shit who clowns it. A vinyl copy on a good stereo is delightful.

OK, here's a few that I bought, liked, and still play:

David Olney~ Eye of the Storm- his solo debut. While certainly firmly planted in the folk base, there was something going on in the subjects of his song that were (and continued to be over the years) perceived and delivered from a skewed place- a song about T.E. Lawrence,and one from the perspective of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. Works for me.

David & David~Boomtown- a one-off full of pure pop goodness.

Richard Thompson~ Daring Adventures- bound to be some nay-saying from somewhere, but this is one of my favorite RT albums. The vocal performance on Long Dead Love is incredible, Nearly In Love is classic Thompson in its wry sensibility laid over an uptempo melody. Al Bowlly's In Heaven gets stuck in my head from time to time and won't get out. Love love love this album.

Van Morrison~ No Guru, No Method, No Teacher- yeh yeh, so I predictably trot out a VM album. Fuck you if you don't like it. This one is as spiritual and ethereal as he ever got, I think. Not much rolling on this one, gentle arrangements, goes good with a glass of pinotage or six. One of my favorite 3 or 4 VM albums.

I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT THAT ONE!

If not the very best album of 1986, certainly the one which best encapsulated that moment in time.

More production, less guitar, less friction, more Brian Wilson.
I can see that to some degree.
As much as think it's a damn near perfect, if I had to pick one XTC record it would most likely be Black Sea or English Settlement.

Yup, a Listmania top 10 for me. I did a blog post on it last year.

Seconds on Raising Hell, and I have a soft spot for Peter Gabriel's So.

Good to see you're feeling better!

While I agree that this year didn't have huge seminal albums by a lot of bands that were great in that decade I still think it was an incredibly important year.

Clearly I'm showing my age (young or old depending on how you look at it) but this was the time for me when Michael Jackson, Prince, Huey Lewis, et al started giving way to The Cure, The Smiths, REM, etc, etc. No coincidence that it's the same year that 120 Minutes debuted on MTV. I got exposed to so many bands through that show.

I think The Smiths and REM also started to show that they were becoming viable commercially as well. Almost a tipping point year for what later became the Alt explosion.

Critically important album in their development from lofi joke-offs to the somewhat more refined psychedelia of the next two albums. Also contains four of my favorite Surfers songs, "Sea Ferring", "Perry", "To Parter" and "Tornadoes" ("I gotta take peeyus")

Also, laying this on the world was um cool:

I like a few other Butthole Surfers albums better than that one, but it's still a damn fine album.

Yeah, it was probably my favorite during some particularly druggy season, but it is sort of mid pack taking the long view this many years later.

I just listened to about half of it though and it holds up (for me).

I didn't mean so much to diss on Skylarking as what came after Skylarking. I liked Skylarking a lot at the time even if not as much as some earlier albums. Oranges & Lemons and Nonesuch were huge disappointments though and Skylarking does seem like a transition album to me. Beginnning of the end, not the end.

That said, I don't seem to have that much interest in XTC these days. I don't know if its a mood thing or a permanent change in taste. I do know though that I'm up to about 80 gigs in repopulating my Ipod after the meltdown last month and I still haven't gotten around to loading any XTC or Talking Heads which I'm surprised by because they used to be top five or so bands for me.

For me, it's down to English Settlement or Skylarking. I think I would put their post-Skylarking material over Big Express and Go 2. I get why some don't like Oranges and Lemons, since half of it sounds like Tears for Fears or something, but there's no reason to slight Nonsuch.