The Gun Club "Miami" (1982)

Talk about an album title not matching its sound.  Even the album cover, showing the band with palm trees, is contradictory to its sound.  There's no sunshine here.  This Miami is only night.  Driving a fast car through the desert, not knowing if you're running to or from something.  The soundtrack to a horror/action movie.

The sound here is less bluesy than "Fire of Love".  For some reason I keep thinking of Echo & the Bunnymen.  Perhaps it's the deep vocals.

This video's from a couple of years after the release of this album, but hey, any cover of CCR is better than CCR, right?

Bruce Springsteen "Nebraska" (1982)

If Springsteen's earlier albums reflect the adolescence of the American Dream, "Nebraska" reflects its middle age.  The frustration is still there, but no longer is there a sense that getting out of town will solve the problems of the narrator.  The problems are bigger than that.  Most of the time they're tragic, in the Greek sense, in that they stem from the narrator's sense of identity.