Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms (1985)

I grew up with Dire Straits. My father and all of his brothers were huge Dire Straits fans and in addition to hearing them a lot at home, they were also constantly played on the radio when I was a kid. As a child I kind of liked the sharp electric guitars and the catchiness of their songs. When I grew up to be a teenager, I realised that their music was incredibly cheesy and kind of boring. Now as a proper adult, I can appreciate some of their songs, but mostly I still think their music is way too cheesy and the production is mostly just awful. As I've said many times earlier in this blog, I pre-inherited my parents' vinyl albums about ten years ago. Initially, I didn't even take the Dire Straits albums, because I couldn't really see myself ever listening to them again. Later on, I've realised that they are considered classics, so the collector me wants to own them.



When my uncles heard that I had taken pretty much all the other albums from my parents except the Dire Straits albums, they were kind of shocked. By not taking the records, I was mocking their heroes. Later on, I have grown to like a couple of their songs that don't have as vulgar sounds, but majority of their music still sounds way too low-brow for me to appreciate it. Part of why I don't like them has to do something with the fact that for a long time, I couldn't stand 80's sounds in music. In 80's commercial music, the drums are merely playing simple straight beats and the bass is hardly doing anything exciting. As a musician, and a bass player no less, I couldn't appreciate music where the role of the rhythm instruments had been reduced to boring loops.

Listening to Brothers in Arms now, I am a bit bored. So Far Away opens the album and it sounds like every other Dire Straits song. Sharp and clean electric guitar with lots of treble. Money for Nothing was one of their greatest hits, but now it just sounds like it's repeating the same stuff over and over again and I found myself hoping that it would end about two minutes before it was actually over. Walk of Life was one of my favourite songs as a kid, because of the perky rock organs. This song is structured like a true rock n' roll song, but the sounds are so close plastic that it's difficult to like the song. Your Latest Trick tries to be a bit more jazzy song, but the sounds are incredibly cheesy and cheap. The saxophone combined with bongo drums and cheap sounding synth sounds is a horrible combination. Why Worry? is not much better. if the song was played on a real piano, it wouldn't really help though, because the song is just so boring. Ride Across the River goes a step even further. It has synth pan flutes. SYNTH PAN FLUTES! Can there be anything more banal than that? The answer is no. The Man's Too Strong is the first song on the album that sounds rather nice. Mostly because it's been played mostly acoustically. There's still nothing really exciting about this song. One World has some slapped bass on top of drums that have way too much echo. The result is more interesting than many other songs on the album, but the sound is really really cheesy. The only song I actually quite enjoy on this album, is the title track Brothers in Arms. The sounds are a lot easier on the ears than in the rest of the album and in terms of songwriting, this song has some beautiful melodies. With a different kind of production, this could actually be a really good song.

In Money for Nothing, they actually mention MTV, so I really have to link that music video here. The video has some computer animation that must've been quite cool back in the day. It also has sequences from a live show where the band has been coloured by some neon lights. Mark Knopfler is wearing his signature sports head band and rest of the band definitely doesn't look any cooler.

I notice I have made quite a rant of this album in this post, but I can't help but feeling like this is one of the most overrated albums in the history of rock music. Of course, the critics were never really positive about it. In NME magazine, there was a review that said this: "Dire Straits are so tasteful as to be entirely flavourless, so laid back as to bore me horizontal". He continues, "So do you seriously want to hear about the further adventures of Mark Knopfler's mawkish self-pity, his lugubriously mannered appropriation of rockin' Americana, his thumpingly crass attempts at wit? Can anybody really be moved, stimulated or entertained by the tritest would-be melodies in history, the last word in tranquilising chord changes, the most cloying lonesome playing and ultimate in transparently fake troubador sentiment ever to ooze out of a million-dollar recording studio?" I kind of have to agree with this review.

Listen to the album on Spotify.