The Police: Classic or Dud, Search and Destroy

My favorite Sting and Police. No "Russians," sadly.

i absolutely love everything about the police except the words. sometimes I just want to pitch a tent in their sound.

when I get that urge I usually just listen to I Advance Masked

love that record, so joyfully underachieving

best Fripp solo ever on the title track, imo

The guitar solo on Mother is almost note-for-note an echo of Fripps guitar solo on Enos Golden Hours.

/ darkness / is good! Double tracked hi-hats in stereo

i absolutely love everything about the police except the words. sometimes I just want to pitch a tent in their sound.

indeed. their 4-disc boxset is great from start to finish, plus its great to get to hear their progression from one year to the next. there's almost something Beatles-like there, the way they evolved so quickly over only 6 or 7 years. even the minor songs have awesome moments on them - that neat little guitar lick on "Contact" during the chorus, for example.

i absolutely love everything about the police except the wordsi

...and even when the words finally fucking stop they go so hard on the dey-yo-yo-yos

been hitting 'shadows in the rain' a lot lately, lyrics are actually okay on that

don't listen to zenyatta much but voices / shadows / camel / stopping are all gold

I see your yoga lute and raise you one chessboard.

http://imgur.com/a/JSmQa

http://imgur.com/a/JSmQa

just the way copeland hits a snare. why does a simple backbeat from him make me jump around so bad? (NB i have read several articles explaining why but there is still a mystery at the core of it IMO)

XP oh hell no

Is there a Stink / Police song that uses a chess metaphor? I'm sure there is but I can't remember

Jon, totally agree. Tight and tasty

I read that he had his snare head cranked so tight they had to beef it up with tons of fx, 1980s or no.

Yes that's part of it, he tightened them til they were on the verge of failure

"The guitar solo on Mother is almost note-for-note an echo of Fripps guitar solo on Enos Golden Hours."

yeah it's a complete lift of it. I love that.

I Advance Masked is really good, better than Bewitched certainly.

I don't have a problem with 99% of the Police's lyrics.

what the hell is going on with those pictures, they look like the cover of a CD-ROM circa 1996

Man, those pix with the lute etc are f-ing hilarious! Stinks' pretence and lack of reality checks is nearly unparalleled.

blame david lynch imo

Not all the lyrics are terrible, but even when they are the rhythms and soundscapes mostly make up for it. (And don't forget Sting's playing as a key part of the sound -- don't throw the bass out with the bathos.)

cheery finns, huge lutes, upturned tables:
https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/wikla/Kuva_arkisto/Nordmaling2001/100-0086_IMG.JPG

Sting's Police lyrics are a strange contrast of hyper pretentious and totally stupid. I could have sworn when they reunited that they retroactively claimed the dumb rhymes were on purpose, but I have my doubts.

That said, musicianship, including Sting, is so across-the-board great. I love how even at their most indulgent and overproduced and overdubbed, they rarely sound like more than three guys in a room. Even though there are all sorts of little nuances and stuff added and tweaked and embellished.

Like, songs with three or four guitar parts that are so subtle and well arranged that it sounds almost just like one guitar. Until you pay close attention.

To be clear, I adore stings voice and the way he sings his lyrics. I just hate the words sometimes.

An older friend, a jazz guy I used to play guitar with, had seen the police live during 83 or so and said something I found memorable: "they were making an awful lot of music for three guys"

I often think of that comment when listening to Rush too

there has always been this weird relationship between Rush and the Police, at least as far as fan overlap, and in Rush's case, actively taking influence from the Police.

I still have a bit of PTSD with Sting. I never really loved his voice, but once I started paying attention to his lyrics, I got more and more annoyed, to the point I couldn't listen to them. However, Copeland is in my top 3 drummers of all time. I can listen to just his isolated tracks all day. And it's incredibly fun to play almost any Police song as a musician. I should probably work on resolving this, because deep down, I know there were great.

My guitar teacher pinpoints Andy Summers genius at recognizing the way his sus and seventh chords and other weird ideas work so well with chorus and echo, the way the effects sort of imply or fill out these broken chords in cool ways.

otm, the effects are baked into the very musical structure, such a painter

there has always been this weird relationship between Rush and the Police, at least as far as fan overlap, and in Rush's case, actively taking influence from the Police.

yea there's some active overlap with prog there - "Synchronicity II" being the most obvious example. I think all three had a background in it at some point.

last time I heard Yes's Big Generator it struck me how many of the songs sounded like what the Police might've had they stuck around to 1987.

Hell, even "Owner of a Lonely Heart" owes a huge debt to the Police.

and everything produced by Rupert Hine

I think all three had a background in it at some point.

Andy: Guitarist w/Eric Burdon & The Animals in their last gasp, proto-prog period
Stewart: Drummer for Curved Air
Sting: Fusion dude

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lYi1fBalGeg/TSYXc8dbz_I/AAAAAAAAFm0/K92djhEReiw/s1600/sc00008742.jpg

andy was also in soft machine but that was firmly during their psych phase

plus they had that proto-Police band Strontium 90, with the 4th member being Mike Howlett of Gong

Andy was in Soft Machine.

Ha, how did I miss that magazine cover?

and everything produced by Rupert Hine

And Men At Work, how capitalized on the relatively long wait between Police records.

Read a good interview with Stewart recently that for all the band's supposed dabbling, he'd only call maybe three Police songs at all reggae derived.

bring on the night
beds too big
one world
?

I dunno, there's a lot of reggae/dub influence all over the first three albums, less on the 4th and 5th. It's as much spatial as specifically structural, but it's definitely there.

walking on the moon?

So Lonely?

A singles compilation is all one really needs from this band - they weren't really a band that had a wealth of killer deep cuts.

Feel kind of cheated that sting hasn't given us an album of lute reggae yet

Yeah, maybe a singles comp and then another disc with Gradenko, Darkness and other faves from this thread

I like Synchronicity but it might be just because I remember my parents playing it when I was a kid