A Thread for Simple Minds - Sons & Fascination/Sister Feelings Call

life in a day - vs- real to real cacophony (both 1979!)

new gold dream -vs- sparkle in the rain

it's amazing to me that i still own all these albums. i've gotten rid of so much stuff over the years.

"The American" and "Love Song" always do it for me, though "Sons and Fascination" is awesome as well.

Side one of Sister Feelings Call and side two of Sons and Fascination make for a great album.

In Trance As Mission
Sweat In Bullet
Wonderful In Young Life
Careful In Career
-
Theme For Great Cities
The American
20th Century Promised Land
Seeing Out The Angels

^^^this'd be a full 10/10 all-timer imo

guess you can sub in Love Song or 70 Cities if you want but I don't want to remove any of those tracks is the issue

I had the Canada-only version of Sons and Fascination, where side 1 begins with "Love Song" and ends with "In Trance as Mission", and the latter still seems very strange as an opening track in its length and pacing.
There's something too strident about "The American" for me, I'd replace it with "Boys From Brazil", "This Earth You Walk Upon" and/or "Love Song".

Nice track list! I hold with my 2008 opinion for the perfect 1981 Simple Minds album:

Side A:
Theme For Great Cities
The American
20th Century Promised Land

Side B:
Love Song
This Earth That You Walk Upon
Sons And Fascination
Seeing Out The Angel

The American has been firmly embedded in my head all week tbh!

In Trance As Mission is a great opening track I reckon. Could go on another ten minutes and it'd still make sense

i saw them on the sparkle in the rain tour when i was a kid and 'the american' was the only pre-new gold dream song that they played. i still like it but i guess it's the one tune that really jelled with their stadium rock urges

That's maybe why it puts me off.

guess you can sub in Love Song or 70 Cities if you want but I don't want to remove any of those tracks is the issue

Yeah I'd have to have 70 Cities on there, I'd take out Careful in Career to make room. Can't argue with the rest though!

Their subsequent downfall was trying to write comprehensible lyrics to match the scope and swell of their music.

“Boys from Brazil” is great and atmospheric imo

not a big fan of “in trance as mission”, the rest of the side smokes it

70 Cities is the best thing here I think, and probably the most formally ambitious - sounds like a song built by the sound of duelling rocket factories.

I’m not sure there’s really a weak track on the combined CD version except “Wonderful In Young Life”. It is exhaustingly long though.

70 Cities would slot straight back in at track 3 then. I do really like Wonderful... though. Hmm

i like wonderful in young life too, very magazine-meets-roxy music

I love when they string words in titles as if they have no idea how functional English works!

“Wonderful In Young Life” is good! Perhaps it’s just less surprising to me than the other material (perhaps precisely because it is Magazine meets Roxy Music), and coming at the end doesn’t help.

Whereas “70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall” is like... Remain in Light meets Abacab?

also electronic cow moos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK-thT2IaaA

slightly later era but have just been watching this tv performance from 1982. version of 'new gold dream' on this is great (starts at 11:05), especially the last couple of minutes - synths just a teeny bit too high in the mix and sounding like a warning of imminent alien invasion, guitar caught up in a whirlpool of delay, bass like a rushing train. it's like some sort of new romantic hawkwind, ominous and psychedelic and really quite strange. there's a version of 'the american' right afterwards and yeah - charlie is already starting to throw in some of those awful out-to-row-z guitar parts, chorus would desperately like to meet an arena that's up for a few nights out and a bit of a singalong

that Hawkwind comparison is so on-point! this kind of IS the space-rock of its time isn't it

"League of Nations" is an attempt to do Can with two bass notes plus mumbling.

Their first album Life In a Day basically alternates between pastiches of Roxy Music and Magazine, but not very effectively.

yeah the title track is nice but otherwise meh

Really amazing that they went from the quite drab Life in a Day to the holy-fuck-what-is-this brilliance of Reel To Real Cacophany in less than a year. Hard to think of many (any?) glow ups so extreme in such a short time span.

I'd say there's a similar leap in quality between the first two Japan albums, also less than a year apart.

"League of Nations" is an attempt to do Can with two bass notes plus mumbling.

big 'mother sky' vibes on this one too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbZSXSICdFE

The body of work that Simple Minds produced between 1980 and 1984 is absolutely phenomenal. Some of the most exciting rock music to ever come out of the U.K. I wish they’d stopped then and walked away as legends instead of fading into parody

R2RC was a good example of second album syndrome, they went into record with John Leckie with just a few songs, I always used to wonder why it was much cheaper than all the other SM records, then I bought it (around 1985) and shelved it away, love it now, of course.

Love SaF/SFC, but can't help feeling that "Theme for Great Cities" is Jim Kerr's best vocal performance.

He was fine chanting mystical nonsense, until he caught a bad case of Bono-itis in the mid 80s.

Real Life is a pretty decent album, but I can't be doing with anything after that

“film theme” from R2RC is dark, sexy, cool as hell. first heard it on a Daniele Baldelli mix

Capital City is my jam, I love that bassline so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hth0iPU29tw

<3 the 5x5 box set, that was my full immersion after years of missing out. Because of that I don't think of these albums individually but as part of a whole continuum.