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An old album, upon first lis­ten, can make great demands of the listener’s imag­i­na­tion. In a sim­i­lar fash­ion, music from the 1980s typ­i­cally requires the lis­tener to keep in mind that it is from the 1980s. Not that a lis­tener has to work had to remem­ber that, as there seems to be a yel­lowy sonic film stan­dard to that decade’s music. Even though the ‘80s was the decade of my child­hood, I’ve never been nos­tal­gic for its music. For that mat­ter, I tend to think nos­tal­gia is the best thing ‘80s music has going for it. Which is to say, I’m gen­er­ally harsh in my judg­ment of ‘80s music.

Recently, how­ever, young artists have brought some redemp­tion to the Rea­gan years by draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from and breath­ing new life into the best and the worst of 1980s sounds. Trends are unpre­dictable, and so pop­u­lar is the yel­lowy film aes­thetic today that most ama­teur dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phers (i.e., peo­ple with iPhones) go to at least a lit­tle bit of trou­ble to add affec­ta­tions of imper­fec­tion to pic­tures of their lunch (or what­ever). Maybe this accounts for why ESG’s 1983 debut, Come Away With ESG, makes so few demands and requires vir­tu­ally no era-related con­sid­er­a­tions. To any­one who sub­scribes to Gorilla vs. Bear’s RSS feed, ESG sounds con­tem­po­rary with — if not even fresher than — many of that blog’s favorite bands.

It would be a mis­take to attribute ESG’s palata­bil­ity solely to cur­rent trends. Trends are ephemeral, and there is a time­less qual­ity to the band’s music, espe­cially in its rhythm sec­tion. The bass and drums rem­i­nisce over early rock ‘n roll and surf rock, indulge in disco with a punk rock demeanor, and pro­vide end­less sam­pling oppor­tu­ni­ties for hip-hop. ESG’s lyrics are sim­ple, focus­ing on love, danc­ing, and “the beat.” The rhythm sec­tion lives up to that, appeal­ing to uni­ver­sal impulses, call­ing forth the most basic response to music (move­ment). The rea­son the music seems time­less is because the beat never goes out of style, and nei­ther does swag­ger. Beat and swag­ger over­flow in Come Away With ESG. I don’t know…maybe that’s all it has, but it’s enough to make it an out­stand­ing album, and, to the point, a time­less album. Had I not known it’s release date, I would’ve had a doozy of a time try­ing to guess even the cor­rect decade. I might have guessed the 1980s only after I’d guessed every other decade from the 1960s until now.

The most obvi­ous time­stamp, I sup­pose, is that the album is rel­a­tively unher­alded. True, Pitch­fork included it in their Top 100 Albums of the 1980s at #84, but that strikes me as a severe under­rat­ing. And, any­way, if it had been released prior to ’81, it would be cel­e­brated by Baby Boomers, prob­a­bly even listed among Rolling Stone’s 500 Great­est Albums of All Time. If it had been released after ’85, Gen-Xers would’ve paid more atten­tion, surely. I think that time between — Reagan’s first term, for the record — is some­thing of a for­got­ten era for pop cul­ture. Maybe it was an era of pop cul­ture plu­toc­racy, any­way; SNL is illus­tra­tive: Eddie Mur­phy opened one episode, “Live, from New York, it’s The Eddie Mur­phy Show!” (It’s also kind of inter­est­ing that Lorne Michaels was gone from the show dur­ing that time, and it suf­fered accord­ingly.) Musi­cally, there was Thriller and “Like a Vir­gin,” and what else? This is the 1980s that isn’t being roman­ti­cized: excess ver­sus obscu­rity, you were huge or you were noth­ing. Or at least it’s easy to get that impres­sion look­ing back at the pop cul­tural (and polit­i­cal) land­scape of the time.

In short, the rel­a­tive obscu­rity of ESG and their mas­ter­piece, Come Away With ESG (only 9,832 lis­ten­ers on last.fm), is an unfor­tu­nate effect of their time. Radio was freer of cor­po­rate inter­ests a few years ear­lier, and indie labels and dis­trib­u­tors became more promi­nent a few years later. The cir­cum­stances were unfor­tu­nate, but they also cre­ated a kind of hid­den­ness that makes dis­cov­ery all the more excit­ing. So it goes, “ESG” orig­i­nally stood for “Emer­ald, Sap­phire, and Gold.” The name was con­densed into those ini­tials that sound like a chem­i­cal preser­v­a­tive used in junk food. Chem­i­cal preser­v­a­tives are what I expect when lis­ten­ing to an ‘80s album for the first time. Come Away With ESG is more like emer­ald, sap­phire, and gold.