Written by: Alex Green

It’s one thing to shoot for the stars, but it’s something else entirely to actually hit them.

On A Pagan Place, The Waterboys’ second album, Mike Scott does just that, crafting one of the most thrilling and exultant albums of the decade.

And it was a competitive decade.

Hell, it was a competitive year.

Produced by Scott himself, A Pagan Place was released in June of 1984 and if you consider what other albums were also unleashed at that time (Let It Be, Purple Rain, Reckoning, Ocean Rain, The Unforgettable Fire) it’s hard not to think of it as the year of masterworks—a year not to check in timidly with anything.

In other words, if one were to flirt with punching the pop clock—1984 was not the time to do it.

That in mind, A Pagan Place is a stratospheric and spiritual blast of Big Music that has all the aching beauty of Van Morrison, the anthemic heights of U2 and its own brand of bluesy post punk soul that’s so sonically exquisite, at times it doesn’t even seem terrestrial.

Scott prowls across the album like a scruffy narrator of a cosmic play that’s being written as it’s being acted out. A Pagan Place feels wild and improvisational and Scott’s feral heart is its unifying center, practically bursting through each composition with a passion that is, as passion should always be, untamed and pure.

The cathartic “Church Not Made With Hands” which is buoyed by a breathless conceit that, “she is everywhere and no place” may very well be one of the best album openers of all time. It crackles with life and urgency and mystery and it brims with a blend of desperation and nerve. Throughout the song Scott sounds like a man reciting a series of Zen Koans—the most dominating of them all being that he’s figured out that he hasn’t figured out anything.

Meanwhile, the vicious and rueful sing-along of “All The Things She Gave Me” flexes the collective muscle of Scott’s band, which now features Karl Wallinger for the first time; the weary “The Thrill Is Gone” which surveys the wreckage of a relationship that went from fireworks to ashes is one of the most crushing and heartbreaking songs ever written, while the fiery “Rags” out-Bunnymens anything Ian McCulloch had come up with on Ocean Rain.

And then there’s the fiddle-stomp of “Somebody Might Wave Back,” the dreamy sax-filled swirl of “The Big Music,” and the stirring eight-minute “Red Army Blues,” whose narrative traces the experiences of a Soviet soldier in the Battle of Berlin all the way to the Gulag.

Scott does more in eight songs here than most bands do in their entire careers.

And as perfectly as A Pagan Place opens, it closes the same way, with the titular track playing out the proceedings in one of the most moving album enders of all time. An acoustic stomp punctuated by a trumpet solo, the song finds Scott inviting, “Drink my soul dry/there is always more.”

Scott is so in the pocket on this record that looking back on his career, A Pagan Place is when he announces himself to be as major of a talent as Bono, Stipe, McCulloch and Robert Smith. But his vision is grander than all of those men, his scope more celestial and more spiritual.

Bono never could have sung a line like, “Look into my face and see the heart of man,” without it coming across as criminally narcissistic. But when Scott sings it, he’s singing it for everyone and he’s singing it with a raging universality.

The Big Music is genuine music and A Pagan Place is its apex.