SPIRIT OF EDEN

Talk Talk's previous Colour of Spring album hid amidst its gorgeous baroque pop hints of an interest in a more jazzy direction, but even taking this into account Spirit of Eden is truly unprecedented. Blending classical music, jazz, rock, soul, and countless other influences into a heady mixture - usually calming, but occasionally, as on Desire, bursting out with feverish energy - it created an entirely unique sonic landscape which has rarely been matched even to this day, in which the distinction between improvisation and composition is blurred entirely. When I first heard people talking about this album as being the very first post-rock release, I thought they must have been exaggerating. If anything, it's an understatement: many post-rock artists only attempt to cover a fraction of the ground explored here.