Echo & The Bunnymen “Ocean Rain” 1984. This past weekend marked two milestone dates: Ocean Rain’s 35th release anniversary (May 4th in the UK) and Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch’s 60th birthday (b. May 5th, 1959). Ocean Rain was the band’s fourth studio LP and it went to #4 in the UK and #87 in the US. It’s big, luscious swirling neo-psychedelic post-punk, backed with a 35-piece orchestra of strings, xylophones, glockenspiels, harpsichord, bongos etc. making many of the tracks feel darkly exotic (especially tracks like “Yo Yo Man” and “Thorn of Crowns”). The Bunnymen released three singles from Ocean Rain: “The Killing Moon” which went to #9 in the UK and then received new life in 2001 as the featured song in the movie Donnie Darko (it’s also been on several other soundtracks including Grosse Point Blank), “Silver” (#30 in the UK, also one of my top tracks on the album) and “Seven Seas” (#16 UK, another fave).

We saw Echo & The Bunnymen back in September 2016 at Turner Hall. I wrote about it then and will quote myself here: “[At the sold-out show] the musical tensions swirled in psychedelic sounds with Ian McCulloch’s voice sounding as strong as it did in the 80′s (including his brief and mostly unintelligible thick brogue banter with the audience). I was a bit apprehensive prior to the show; a friend of mine saw them in DC earlier this year and said their performance was rather poor, the band disengaged and kinda phoning it in. Either they got into their touring groove or just really liked Milwaukee because they genuinely seemed happy to be here. And while no dizzyingly displays of dancing acrobatics or crazy showmanship transpired (that really would have been weird), the sound was tight and McCulloch even cracked a few smiles, especially when he messed up a lyric and whispered-sang ‘I really fucked that up,’ which charmed the crowd completely.”