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Knopfler's past achievements lay in his ability to stretch the rock idiom, expand it - to use rock's limitations as his starting point. "On Every Street" is Dire Straits' least ambitious album.
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"Fade to Black" reworks an idea from "Making Movies" to lesser effect, while "Heavy Fuel" and "My Parties" reprise the cynicism and social satire of the band's biggest hit, "Money for Nothing." The title track updates the "Love Over Gold" song "Private Investigations," and there's even a "Brothers in Arms"-style war song, "Iron Hand." Knopfler has always valued universal over personal experience, but here his imagery seems washed out. "On Every Street" lacks the complex metaphorical layers of its predecessors Mr. On the lyric sheet, each song title is designed to look like a postmark, as if the songs were letters from different states of the mind.īut the lyrics also retread a surprising amount from past albums. Knopfler continues to gripe about lust, greed, corruption, capitalism, dirty money, empty hearts, broken hearts, blood-stained battlefields, starving children, television evangelists. The album has neither the bouncy, unapologetic pop of songs like "Walk of Life," nor the immense sweep of "Telegraph Road," from "Love Over Gold," but rather a deft, middle-of-the-road compromise between the two. The new recording includes the same super-sophisticated guitar arpeggios, epic synthesizer backdrops, brooding ballads and intricate production techniques that have defined Dire Straits since 1980. "Calling Elvis," the opening track of "On Every Street," rises so cleanly from the fade-out of the last track of "Brothers in Arms," the two songs could almost be adjacent on the same album. Knopfler's lengthy hiatus has not led him to rethink Dire Straits' direction if anything, it has allowed him to peg the band's sound more certainly. Knopfler indulged his penchant for sonic vistas by composing the film scores of "The Color of Money," "The Princess Bride" and "Last Exit to Brooklyn." Then he recorded two side projects: "Neck and Neck," an album of duets with the country-western guitarist Chet Atkins, and an off-the-cuff collection of traditional songs with the Notting Hillbillies, a kind of poor-man's Traveling Wilburys. In the six years since the release of "Brothers in Arms," Dire Straits have toured 117 cities and played to world audiences at events like Live Aid. Knopfler had examined life's great truths under a microscope and wanted to project what he found onto the very heavens above. Mark Knopfler, the band's lead singer, songwriter, producer and guitar wizard, seemed bent on transforming rock into an idiom capable of near-operatic beauty Dire Straits albums sounded as though Mr.
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"Romeo and Juliet," from their 1980 album "Making Movies," tried to answer age-old questions about love with a starry-toned mandolin melody and lines like "All I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme." The 1982 opus "Love Over Gold" reconciled violently opposed musical extremes, from a drum beat resounding like thunder to a piano trickling like water in a gutter.Įven the simplest cliches, like the it'll-be-all-right sentiment of "Why Worry," from the 1985 megahit "Brothers in Arms," were vested with enough emotion to elevate them above the ordinary. From their self-titled 1978 debut through their new album, "On Every Street" (Warner Brothers 26680 cassette and CD), Dire Straits have been responsible for some of the prettiest moments in all of rockdom.