musical-moodswings:

Artist: The Police
Track: King of Pain
Album: Synchronicity
Year: 1983

That’s my soul up there

(Source: brehon)

inthefade:

The Police - Synchronicity II

5:05 song for 5/05

This whole album defines the summer of 1983 for me. Everyone I knew was listening to it. The punks, the metalheads, the disco geeks – even my mother was in love with it. It was at times beautiful and at times dark and ugly. But the entire album – even the songs a lot of people write off like Miss Gradenko and Mother - were perfect musical specimens, showing off the talent of each individual band member and bringing everything together – music, lyrics, stories, emotion – in what I always described as a masterpiece (the overplayed and misunderstoodEvery Breath You Take notwithstanding). For me, the pinnacle of the album came on Synchronicity II, a tale of the darkness that looms under the surface in the life of a suburban family; how all the little things become big things when lived day to day, every single day of your entire life and sometimes it’s enough to turn you into a monster that slowly creeps toward madness.

There are pop rhythms thrown in with intense drumming and a foreboding bass line and the way the chorus and verses switch up pace is like moving between between chapters of a story. I always loved the line “The secretaries pout and preen like cheap tarts in a red light street,” more for the way he breathlessly sings it than the words, and my favorite part is when Stewart Coupland’s drumming perfectly punctuates the line ” a humiliating kick in the crotch.”

I really wish Sting didn’t go off and fall in love with himself after this album. Then again, the band put out five near-perfect albums. Maybe they knew enough to quit while they were ahead.

My favorite Police song and a song I use in my Humanities class when we’re discussing “Man’s Search For Meaning” and how sometimes we fall into patterns and our grooves become ruts. I usually pair this with the film American Beauty.

(Source: openareas)

somesongsconsidered:

“Wrapped Around Your Finger” – The Police 
(Words/music: Sting, available on Synchronicity, A&M 1983) 

Like many drummers, Stuart Copeland has an expansive drum kit with multiple sizes of tom toms and cymbals.  Unlike most drummers, Stuart Copeland finds ways to make every bit of the kit useful.  The groove through the first two thirds of “Wrapped Around Your Finger” isn’t complex – bass drum on beats one and three, rim knock on four (making it a sort of cousin to the “Be My Baby” beat alluded to in last week’s post), but Copeland makes it more than just simple timekeeping.  Instead, he embellishes with the high tom tom, open hi-hat, and even his tiny splash cymbal, all the while keeping a light touch.  Where a lesser drummer (or at least my recreation of this beat) might weight down the song, Copeland never overplays despite incorporating all of the different aspects of the kit.  What’s notable is that Copland doesn’t even touch his snare drum, a staple in rock music, until the chorus.

The restraint here eventually pays off, as the track shifts during the final verse.  While Sting’s lyrical turnaround – “now your servant is your master” – isn’t the most poetic of his career, Copeland’s drumming follows the cue anyway.  His light click on the snare’s rim becomes a full on snare hit on both beats two and four, essentially giving the track a “double time” feel.  While Copeland continues to embellish with little fills (and varies playing on both the middle and the inner bell of the ride cymbal – one of his favorite tricks), he essentially plays the rest of the song straightforward.  To be fair, Copeland’s shift to two and four follows Sting’s bassline, which slips into doubletime a few bars before Copeland moves over to his drums.  It’s this precise interplay in the rhythm section (not to mention Andy Summers’ always skillful lead guitar, but there’s only so much to target in one post) that made Sting’s songs come to life so dramatically during this era.  

More on The Police: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Synchronicity II” by The Police

(Words/Music: Sting, Album: Synchronicity, A&M Records 1983)

With its haunting lyrics about the dangers of leading a mundane life and the monotony of an industrialized society, I always found this to be the most lyrically creative and interesting song in The Police canon. While undoubtedly at the height of their success on Synchronicity with other hits like the equally haunting “King of Pain,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” and “Every Breathe You Take,” The Police were able to sneak in social commentary alongside their quirky and stalker-ish love songs. That commentary, as supported by the post-apocalyptic Billy Idol-meets-Thunderdome video, states that life in an industrialized society, particularly one in the suburbs, is without meaning. It is the same basic principal as movies ranging from American Beauty and Revolutionary Road (both directed by Sam Mendes) to Fight Club, Edward Scissorhands, and Pleasantville. The part that I find strange is that the suburbs are where I grew up and where I make a living. So why are they always portrayed as soul-crushingly bad?

My first instinct when listening to this song or watching one of the aforementioned movies is to shake my finger at the screen and/or sneer in an menacing fashion in an attempt to show my agreement about how awful life in the suburbs is. But the paradox here is this: can a person who is wholly a product of the suburbs effectively criticize their blandness? Doesn’t the fact that (s)he recognizes that blandness indicate that they exist, in some part, outside of it? And wouldn’t being able to interpret and agree with the statement indicate that the suburbs are not completely filled with (to quote Lester Burnham from American Beauty) “bloodless, money grubbing freak[s]” and, in essence, defeat the argument altogether? Perhaps the key to the song and our quandary lies in the last, oddly out of place lyrics of each verse about something crawling in or out of a Scottish lake. If interpreted as some sort of monster (or an archetypal representation of fear), then the song becomes about our fear of sliding into the routines of the lifeless characters on display in this song or in these films. So it’s not that the suburbs are always portrayed negatively, it’s just that they are a convenient and common setting for these revelations to take place.

More from The Police: AmazonMP3 – lala – last.fm