Causally Connectible
Today’s formative-album replay: The Police Synchronicity. Oh, how I came to despise this record, largely thanks to a freshman dorm roommate who owned and played to a nub a total of three CDs (the other two were the Cars' Heartbeat City and a collection of Sousa marches, I kid you not). By then I had already outgrown this ubiquitous 1983 megahit, but having it pounded further into my ears throughout the fall of 1986 effectively killed its appeal for me, even one song I'd call a favorite, "Synchronicity II."
Surely more than enough time has passed to earn it a fresh listen. And while I still can't rank this, the Police's final album, any higher than their fourth best (after the first three), this replay helped me recover some strong impressions, if not quite my first. For one: It hangs together, sound-wise, remarkably well, from the chirpy ringtone loop of the sloganeering opener (“Synchronicity I”) to the chiming, artfully out-of-tune jazz jangle of the cynical closer (“Murder by Numbers”*). Also: As with even the Police’s worst songs (there aren’t that many), it’s all designed and played at such a high level of craft that it’s hard not to admire.
But let’s just name it: If Ghost in the Machine is the record where frontman Sting began his self-styled transformation into pop philosopher-king, Synchronicity is the one in which he fully matriculated to the priesthood of his own mind, where every song is a sermon or a book report. This is also the record which banished every last vestige of faux-Caribbean sunlight from the band’s sound, aiming instead squarely for an MOR pop/rock pocket that reaches its nadir with the interminable Tantric shimmer of “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” (Even the one arguably tropical-ish number, “Walking in Your Footsteps,” feels continents away from the dub stomp of “Walking on the Moon.”)
And yet: Even in mainstream mode the Police can still pack an odd, astringent punch, with Sting’s searing whinge of a voice and darting bass intersecting with Andy Summers’s artfully unlikely, unobtrusive guitar lines over the alert, one-step-ahead crackle of Stewart Copeland’s drums. Their idiosyncratic sound-meld may find its apotheosis in “King of Pain,” in which Sting’s most over-reaching lyric miraculously sticks the landing, I think in large part due to the song’s alternately sparse and surging arrangement, as it bursts from the stark modal chant of the verse into the major-key splash of the chorus. It almost sounds like Sting may be laughing at himself; either way he's definitely laughing.
The other high point, the full-on rockestral horror of “Synchronicity II,” features another ambitious lyric with a layered, three-dimensional musical arrangement to match. We almost don’t notice, as the song brings its cauldron of dread and suspense to a delicious boil, that it's not about synchronicity at all but another of Jung’s pet theories, the “shadow” that acts out our repressed fantasies. Of course, it’s always a mistake to take pop music as scholarship or scripture, even--or especially--when its makers conceive it to be so. What’s still devilishly seductive about much of this record, for all its flaws (hello, “Mother”), is that no matter how heady or heavy its frontman’s literary intentions, Sting and co. retained the chops to defy the gravity of pretension with lean, leaping pop.
*An avid fan has pointed out that this was not the final track on vinyl, which was "Tea in the Sahara," but was a "bonus" on cassette and CD. The latter were the only way I ever consumed the album. I think the point about the consistency of the sound stands either way.
Previous Police replay: Regatta de Blanc.
Surely more than enough time has passed to earn it a fresh listen. And while I still can't rank this, the Police's final album, any higher than their fourth best (after the first three), this replay helped me recover some strong impressions, if not quite my first. For one: It hangs together, sound-wise, remarkably well, from the chirpy ringtone loop of the sloganeering opener (“Synchronicity I”) to the chiming, artfully out-of-tune jazz jangle of the cynical closer (“Murder by Numbers”*). Also: As with even the Police’s worst songs (there aren’t that many), it’s all designed and played at such a high level of craft that it’s hard not to admire.
But let’s just name it: If Ghost in the Machine is the record where frontman Sting began his self-styled transformation into pop philosopher-king, Synchronicity is the one in which he fully matriculated to the priesthood of his own mind, where every song is a sermon or a book report. This is also the record which banished every last vestige of faux-Caribbean sunlight from the band’s sound, aiming instead squarely for an MOR pop/rock pocket that reaches its nadir with the interminable Tantric shimmer of “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” (Even the one arguably tropical-ish number, “Walking in Your Footsteps,” feels continents away from the dub stomp of “Walking on the Moon.”)
And yet: Even in mainstream mode the Police can still pack an odd, astringent punch, with Sting’s searing whinge of a voice and darting bass intersecting with Andy Summers’s artfully unlikely, unobtrusive guitar lines over the alert, one-step-ahead crackle of Stewart Copeland’s drums. Their idiosyncratic sound-meld may find its apotheosis in “King of Pain,” in which Sting’s most over-reaching lyric miraculously sticks the landing, I think in large part due to the song’s alternately sparse and surging arrangement, as it bursts from the stark modal chant of the verse into the major-key splash of the chorus. It almost sounds like Sting may be laughing at himself; either way he's definitely laughing.
The other high point, the full-on rockestral horror of “Synchronicity II,” features another ambitious lyric with a layered, three-dimensional musical arrangement to match. We almost don’t notice, as the song brings its cauldron of dread and suspense to a delicious boil, that it's not about synchronicity at all but another of Jung’s pet theories, the “shadow” that acts out our repressed fantasies. Of course, it’s always a mistake to take pop music as scholarship or scripture, even--or especially--when its makers conceive it to be so. What’s still devilishly seductive about much of this record, for all its flaws (hello, “Mother”), is that no matter how heady or heavy its frontman’s literary intentions, Sting and co. retained the chops to defy the gravity of pretension with lean, leaping pop.
*An avid fan has pointed out that this was not the final track on vinyl, which was "Tea in the Sahara," but was a "bonus" on cassette and CD. The latter were the only way I ever consumed the album. I think the point about the consistency of the sound stands either way.
Previous Police replay: Regatta de Blanc.
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