Today we unveil the results of Part 1 of our year-long Best of the ’80s feature, an ambitious, year-by-year poll of Slicing Up Eyeballs’ readers to determine just what were the best albums of each year of the 1980s — and then, when that’s all said and done at the end of 2013, we’ll run a monster best-of-the-decade poll.

Not much of a surprise given Steven Severin’s recent hint, but the lone album by The Glove — 1983′s ‘Blue Sunshine’ — will be reissued as an individually numbered 2LP set on blue vinyl for Record Store Day next month, featuring not just the full album but the 16 demos originally included on the 2006 expanded CD reissue.

The Cure has been no stranger to special Record Store Day releases — last year saw an expanded Entreat, plus reissues of the band’s first six albums in the U.K. — and this year’s no different, with an individually numbered, red-vinyl reissue of 1987’s ‘Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’ due out next month.

Four years, 3,149 individual posts, 2 million unique visitors, 6.4 million total pageviews. But out of all that, what are the most popular headlines on Slicing Up Eyeballs since this site launched on Feb. 20, 2009? Well, as you can see from the list below, they involve news about Nirvana, The Cure, U2, R.E.M., The Smiths and Depeche Mode.

It’s been a few years since former Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist Steven Severin expressed hope that he could one day work with The Cure’s Robert Smith on new music together as The Glove, and while it’s unclear whether that ever happened, it appears there’s something on the horizon from the short-lived side project.

As Robert Smith first teased last summer, The Cure will return to South America for the first time in 17 years this April, mounting its first-ever large-scale tour of the continent, performing seven concerts in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Colombia — followed by a one-off show in Mexico City to end the trek.

The Glove is best remembered for bringing together Robert Smith of The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist Steven Severin. But the group, which released a single album, ‘Blue Sunshine,’ in 1983, also featured vocalist Jeanette Landray — who looks back on the experience after 30 years in this video.

We finish out the Slicing Up Eyeballs Readers Poll 2012 by counting down your picks for the Top 10 live acts of the year, a list that includes The Jesus and Mary Chain, Peter Murphy, Dead Can Dance, The Fixx, The Cure, Bob Mould, Adam Ant, Duran Duran, New Order and Swans.

As part of their Kickstarter campaign to raise $75,000, the makers of the documentary “Beautiful Noise” have released footage of their interview with The Cure’s Robert Smith in which he discusses his love of the Cocteau Twins and how that band’s 1984 album Treasure helped prepare him for his wedding.

For this week’s “120 Minutes” Rewind,we present a great 20-year time capsule: It’s the full, hour-long “120 Minutes Presents: The Alternative Year in Rock” special that aired on on Nov. 24, 1992 — the Tuesday before Thanksgiving — and features host Dave Kendall in what likely was one of his final “120” appearances.

Tim Burton’s latest stop-motion creation, “Frankenweenie,” doesn’t debut in theaters for another 10 days, but the companion album Frankenweenie Unleashed! came out today featuring a brand-new recording from The Cure’s Robert Smith: a woozy cover of the old Frank Sinatra standard “Witchcraft,” which you can stream here.

This week’s new releases include expanded reissues of albums from R.E.M. (‘Document’), Sex Pistols (‘Never Mind the Bollocks’), INXS (‘Kick’) and Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, plus new music from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, with Yoko Ono, and Mark Eitzel, John Foxx and The Cure’s Robert Smith.

Long-running darkwave favorites Clan of Xymox — still centered around founding member Ronny Moorings — this fall will pay tribute to some of its own favorite bands with a collection called ‘Kindred Spirits’ that will feature covers of tracks by The Cure, Depeche Mode, Siouxsie and the Banshees and both Joy Division and New Order.