The good news is 2016 didn't claim him and here's a new album. The not so good news is that it's so-so. The better news is that it's ostensibly a straight up rock album. For somebody who bought his damn Lute record with Deutsche Grammophon, you approach it with trepidation. It really has been a while since Sting gave us a straight up rocker.
He's been talking about this one like he's going back to his roots but of course his roots is jazz, so it's a bit deceptive. I guess some of these numbers could be perceived to be Police-like numbers, but the beats-per-minute slows down rapidly during the album and gets a little snoozy. I'd hoped he'd go through the whole album at 145bpm, because that's where The Police found gold on 'Outlandos' and 'Regatta', but also, no, he slips back towards a 'Nothing Like The Sun' vibe which isn't what was really being hoped for.
If anything, the single cut 'I Can't Stop Thinking About You' should have been done with the Police. The rest, not so much. I guess if the album rocked any harder, it would have been quicker to reassemble the Police, but that's one place to which he's never really going back. More's the pity.
Blast From The Past 'Alchemy' - Dire Straits
I picked this up because I recently got into a conversation with an old friend about just what the hell happened to Dire Straits after their fourth studio album 'Love Over Gold'. Well, they did this double live album which features a bit of Brett Whitley art on the cover. It was quite something back in the day, with its mind-blowing gatefold double LP cover. Behold:
As it turns out, the live versions these classic Dire Straits tracks go on and on and it got me thinking about why I liked the album 'Love Over Gold' so much and of course Mark Knopfler does the Steve Howe thing of swapping guitars mid-song and radically going from classical guitar tones to Stratocaster. That, is one of the hallmarks of prog rock, together with the really long songs; so it finally dawned on me just how much prog rock Dire Straits were doing on their first four albums without really telling the world that's what they were doing. You could draw a line from 'And You And I' to 'Romeo and Juliet'. If you substitute out Roger Dean and insert Brett Whitely, well, you get the idea.
What happened with Mark Knopfler after 'Alchemy' was he moved on to playing a Gibson Les Paul a lot more as his main guitar, than his Stratocaster, and suddenly it sounded a lot less interesting for me. 'Brothers in Arms' was the huge international hit, but I really don't like that album as much as I like the first four studio albums. As with Sting, he's never really managed to recapture that magic of his early work.
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