Dire Straits : Love Over Gold

A nd then there was the enigmatic Love Over Gold. It couldn’t be less concerned with singles, generating a great one anyway in “Industrial Disease,” but otherwise oblivious to the album that preceded it. Mark Knopler had nothing but time, time to follow his own Desire and climb The Wall, which has occasioned AMG to call this “their prog-rock effort.” Of course it’s not prog rock, but it proves what many suspected: if given enough rope, Dire Straits could get pretty strung out. Just listen as the endings on “Private Investigations” and “It Never Rains” devolve into minor musical orgies. If Dire Straits were on a mission to write great rock songs, Making Movies completed that mission, allowing the band to make a mystical, long-in-the-tooth, black hole of a record with Love Over Gold. As such, the album shares a kinship with Floyd’s The Final Cut, Sabbath’s Volume 4, Tales From Topographic Oceans and all the other anti-heroes. In another sense, Gold is their Aja: sophisticated and unhurried, sober and sometimes sad. The title track especially, featuring Mike Mainieri on vibes and/or marimba (I can’t tell the difference), has a Steely resolve to it. The torpid pacing of Gold carried over to Alchemy, so maybe the Straits were in their Blue Phase. It’s a phase that radio listeners missed. “Industrial Disease” and, later, “Twisting By The Pool” were silly, upbeat songs that showed little of the deep-running dark currents at work on Love Over Gold. While it may have given the record execs fits, Gold strikes a blow for the band’s principles, and represents the sort of quirky, indulgent misstep that fans love to rally around.