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Love Over Gold

Dire Straits - Love Over Gold Audio CD

A fair review of the Dire Straits "Love Over Gold" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Dire Straits reviews here, or go back to the Dire Straits tabs.

Band: Dire Straits
Title: Love Over Gold
Rating:

Release Date: 1999-12-28
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Telegraph Road 2: Private Investigations 3: Industrial Disease 4: Love Over Gold 5: It Never Rains

The best album in Dire Straits' catalogue.

The "Love Over Gold" had noticeable tape hiss even on the last (1999) remaster. Until Dire Straits back catalogue is remastered in SACD or DVD-A format (except "Brothers In Arms" which is already in these two formats), this Japanese SHM-CD remaster will do as a subsitute. The SHM-CD by contrast is quieter and has much sharper definition.

If you can track a copy of this SHM-CD version, good luck and be prepare to pay for it! .

Dire Straits' Best Album! Knopfler At the Peak of His Craft! A Word About SHM in General!
This is by far the best Dire Straits album ever with every track exhibiting a side of Knopfler's personality and compositional skill. It took Mark Knopfler 4 albums to reach the height of his artistic abilities at least when it comes to creating a recording that can only be described as a masterpiece of aural art. From the singular wit and sense of humour that we had a hint of from tracks like "Les Boys" from the earlier album Communiqu� to the funny lyric or two on "Romeo and Juliet" from Making Movies we get my favourite tongue in cheek laugher "Industrial Disease" here. Although this may not have been his best selling album but then again it should be no surprise that this is the case as it is frequently so that an artist's best ever work is not also his most commercially successful one, as an overall completely and consistently solid piece of art, make no mistake that "Love Over Gold" represents Knopfler at the top of his game and he's not come even close since. Brothers in Arms is his well-deserved commercial sell-out and his pension plan but is nowhere close to reaching the heights that this brilliant album does. If you are looking at getting just one album from Dire Straits folks let this one be it.

This album has also been remastered very well even though it has nothing to do with the SHM process more of which I will cover later. The sound quality due to the remastering is first class making this the best sounding version of the album that I've ever heard. This mlps (mini-lp replica sleeve) version though is a mixed bag. First the great news: this album has been very well remastered for an excellent sound and has a 16-page booklet with all the lyrics in both English and Japanese and rather bizarrely has a square cardboard insert of the original lp centre circle of both sides of the record indicating at the bottom right my "copy no. 1496" making me wonder who the lucky bloke is who has "copy no. 1". The inner jacket sleeve faithfully replicates the original lp with all the tiny lyrics on it. The only beef I have with this and is why I only gave it 4 stars is the actual assembly of the mlps itself which is so disappointingly poor given the quality of the rest of the package. The cardboard is of thin poor quality and looks as if it will fall apart once the glue gets old. For examples of very well assembled mlps designs go see the ones done for the entire Hall & Oates reissue as well as those done for Queen and The Band which are simply works of art which showed those concerned had great pride in their work. Too bad there are no bonus tracks here as it would have been nice to have the single "Twisting By the Pool" included.

"Telegraph Road" is my favourite Knopfler tune and I believe it to be his best ever. "Private Investigations" is another classic and has to be among the top 10 tunes he has ever written showcasing his completeness as a guitarist playing a very decent Spanish style guitar throughout. "Love Over Gold" is such a beautiful track that it almost brings tears of joy to my eyes whenever I hear it. Parts of it sound a lot like Tina Turner's hit single "Private Dancer" to me but I guess I shouldn't be surprised as that track was part written by Knopfler himself and you can't get mad at a guy for ripping himself off anyway. Listening to this cd while I write this I am amazed at just how good the sound quality is and I have to applaud the job the remasters engineers did a few years back. Too bad the mlps design couldn't do justice to the overall package though.

A word about SHM-CD so that there's no more confusion seeing as how I've gotten a few of these cds I've discovered that the important thing to note is that SHM cds are NOT remastered. They claim to have improved the plastic surface so that the laser reading the track info is better able to provide a clearer sound. After regretfully finding out the hard way after listening to both my original cd versions and the SHM versions of Whitesnake's "1987" and Def Leppard's "Hysteria" and "Adrenalise" among a few others I've found out that unless the underlying tracks have been remastered well, the SHM process only accentuates and emphasises the limitations of the original master. By making a better reflective surface, all SHM does is to make the imperfections sound worse unless again they have been well mastered to begin with. That explains why this album sounds so good because the SHM treatment was done to the remastered version and why the Whitesnake and Def Leppard SHMs sound so terribly bad and even worse than my original cd versions which haven't been remastered before the SHM treatment was applied and so only succeeded in making the terrible imperfections on my original cd become much more obvious and ironically I had to pay a lot more money to get a worse sounding cd to my original ones. Just a friendly warning so that you know what SHM is all about and why a truly well-done remaster is what you should look for and not just a better reflective surface which is what SHM represents. For this reason, I have done deeper research in ensuring the SHM treatment is being done on previously well remastered cds before getting for example the Moody Blues and Alan Parsons Project albums that have been advertised as being given the SHM treatment. I should be getting these soon and I'll be able then to tell you how they sound. I'm avoiding like the plague any SHM cds advertised that I cannot first ascertain the source of the original master. Now they are advertising a new "Blu-cd" which apparently uses a similar process to Sony's Blu-ray dvds and that holds some excitement for me as it may just make existing old cds sound better as it's an entire process and not just using better quality plastic reflective surfaces like SHM which cannot actually do anything to improve a poor master to begin with but instead ironically to make it sound a lot worse!

In conclusion, this mlps version of an excellent album is a mixed bag because it costs a great deal and yet the cardboard sleeve is poorly designed and assembled but the excellent sound quality somewhat makes up for this. You decide if this is still a value proposition enough for you to part with the serious mullah this retails at. .

Better than Brothers in Arms, but the Straits will never be one of my favorite bands
So I decided I'd check out the two albums that the "real" fans love, with Love over Gold being one of them (and Making Movies, which I also intend to review, being another). I've never been a fan of Brothers in Arms, obviously the group's biggest success, or either of the solo Mark Knopfler albums I've heard - but I thought I'd give their work a try, since it's unfair to dismiss a band just by hearing one album of theirs. And, well. . . basically, it's uneventful. I will stand firmly by my belief that the famous "epic" "Telegraph Road" goes nowhere, other than a few interesting guitar passages - but come on, when you're more or less soloing for fourteen minutes it's expected that after a while you'll get lucky and play something worthwhile eventually. And the verse sections are just kind of boring meditations on how people ruined the environment. There's no real structure to it, either - rather, it just kind of meanders from one riff to another without offering us any reason as to why it's doing so. I think it was his attempt to craft a progressive suite much like Yes' "Close to the Edge", but without the virtuosity of Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe, the instrumental passages lose me. It's never offensive, unlike a majority of Brothers and Arms, and that's to its credit. But if I wanted to hear guitar wankery (and hey, I like a lot of guitar wankery), I'd put on something like "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" for chilling out, or "Machine Gun" for rocking out. Either way, you can do much better than this. I guess the piano part's pretty. Now, I know for certain I like "Private Investigations", if nothing else than for that pretty acoustic guitar and flute, because Mark Knopfler mumbles his way through it. See, that's another problem I have with this group: Mark Knopfler's kind of a boring guy. His unassuming nature can be charming, or it can be deadly dull. On "Private Investigations", it's both. Again, that's a hell of an acoustic guitar solo he plays (and the marimba and flute), and his crunchy electric riffs are satisfying, but you can barely make out what he's saying. On the other hand, the boogie "Industrial Disease" does nothing but exasperate me. You see, Dire Straits are okay at making really quiet atmospheric late-night chill stuff (though they're not great at anything), but they should not boogie. "Walk of Life" boogies, and it's one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard. "Industrial Disease" boogies too, and it's even worse. And it's not funny either. It wants to be, but it's not. It's got a talkbox, too, which isn't good. "Love Over Gold" itself is a bit like "Private Investigations", and hey, I like it! You can actually hear Knopfler, that's a plus. And it's got a cool Steely Dan vibe to it. And again, nice piano and acoustic guitar. I mean, it's the kind of song that really fades into the background when it ends, but I enjoy it while it's playing. "Private Investigations" is the same way. . . and every other song I like by this band. Sadly, "It Never Rains" is the worst track other than "Industrial Disease" (absolutely horrible song!). Like "Telegraph Road", it tries and fails to be a big sweeping epic for all generations, but unlike "Telegraph Road" there isn't a single memorable passage in it. Really, it's more of a long Springsteen rip-off than anything else. And I like Springsteen a lot more than Dire Straits. Again, "It Never Rains" is rarely offensive, but it's even duller than "Telegraph Road". I actually like looking at this album's cover more than I like listening to the music itself. But the music isn't bad. . . for the most part, anyway. Unless you're talking about "Industrial Disease".

Stellar compositions.
"Brothers in Arms" has elements of a passacaglia, and so does "Speedway to Nazareth" on his latest solo release, "Sailing to Philadelphia. Mark Knopfler obviously loves to write passacaglias -- pieces of music that start with a very basic theme, played by only one or very few instruments and, often over repeated crescendos and slow-downs, increasing in volume and instrumentation to a rousing finale, performed by either all instruments or the instrumental lead "voice;" in Knopfler's case of course his trademark Fender Strat. " His greatest achievement though, not only in this regard, has to be "Telegraph Road," the opening track of "Love Over Gold. " In a little over 14 minutes, the song rises from a simple opening melody, evoking the loneliness of that man walking along a deserted track at the beginning of the song's story, to a final guitar solo which is among the most ambitious and evocative pieces of music written by anyone in recent decades, anywhere and in any musical category. In between, there are no less than two other guitar solos, each of them over a minute long; dramatic centerpieces in their own right in any song but this one. And like the song's instrumentation, its lyrics trace the story of civilization from that one man walking along a track to a modern city, with six lines of traffic (three lines moving slow), unemployment, desolation and anger; so apparent in Knopfler's coarse vocals in the final verse and echoed with even greater force in the instrumental finale.

"Telegraph Road" is followed by the sinister "Private Investigations," reminiscent of Alan Parsons's interpretation of the Poe classic "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" (listen to that steady beat underneath the instrumental part and tell me you don't hear the "Tell Tale Heart"), and as daring and elaborate in its composition as "Telegraph Road. " Both pieces are made possible by the advent of Alan Clark and his skills as a pianist; and yet, here as there it is Knopfler's guitar play that takes front and center stage. Next is the wicked "Industrial Disease," followed by the album's title track, and last, "It Never Rains," Knopfler's bow to Bob Dylan, rendered in an interpretation so true to life that you inadvertently feel yourself transported back by a decade or more and expect him switch into "The Times They Are A-Changin'" any second. One may wonder why the record, given its mostly gloomy and cynical mood, was not named for one of the two equally stunning and dark first tracks. Perhaps, however, the answer lies in the title song's last verse: "It takes love over gold and mind over matter to do what you do that you must, when the things that you hold can fall and be shattered or run through your fingers like dust. "

The album's cover rightly (although somewhat unnecessarily) describes "Love Over Gold" as "one of Dire Straits' most ambitiously conceived projects to date" and points out that it "reflects almost a year's worth of meticulous attention. " Short of his film music (which he was not to start writing until a year later, with "Local Hero"), this album was the closest yet that Knopfler has come to classical composition; not just in the record's first two masterpieces but right down to little details like the xylophone air underneath the title track. It was a hard act to follow, even for a Mark Knopfler; and his virtually only choice was to take his music into other, and more diverse directions ("Brothers in Arms"). Listening to the remastered CD version of "Love Over Gold," you almost forget that unlike its mega-selling successor this recording was not "made for CD;" which in itself speaks volumes to the quality of the sound engineering and production and, more importantly, to the indeed "meticulous attention" given to every single instrumental and human voice of every single track on the album. In all of its 41+ minutes, and although it does not reflect as wide a range of musical styles as Knopfler's later work, "Love Over Gold" is one of the most complex pieces of recording he ever produced. It may have taken the release of "Brothers in Arms" to propel Dire Straits to worldwide fame forever. But it is impossible to listen to "Love Over Gold" and not recognize the unique talent of a man who, having found an initial foothold in the musical scene through the success of his band's first three albums, here made it clear once and for all just how much more the world had yet to expect from him.

Also recommended:
Alchemy: Dire Straits Live
On the Night
Dire Straits
Night in London
Sailing to Philadelphia (CD & DVD Audio)
Local Hero (1983 Film).

Best CD of All Time!!!!

1. This album is great!!!

Every song I rate is 4-5 stars. Telegraph Road: Great album opener, it is an epic, very
long. Starts out with nothing first, then comes along with a
true story. And then the song has a great ending to it. This is
my favorite song on the entire CD.

2. Private Investigations: Nice acoustic work! I love the loud
heavy metal guitar. A must listen to if you are a heavy metal
fan!

3. Industrial Disease: I love this song! It has great lyrics
and great music. Sometimes I repeat this song because it it so
funny. My favorite part is where Doctor Parkinson speaks.
At first I didn't like this, but later, it grew on me and I like
it a lot. Great work.

4. Love over Gold: One of my favorite songs on this! Nice song,
I love the ending. I think this is one of the best acoustic songs
of all time!!

5. It Never Rains: Perfect way to close this album!! This has
some of the best heavy metal riffs I have ever heard. Nice lyrics
and sometimes I repeat this track again! One of the best DS songs
ever recorded.

Overall, the best 80's album ever!!

Dire Straits are one of the greatest bands of all time!!

Buy it now.

You can see a complete list of all Dire Straits discography, or go back to the Dire Straits tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.