DIRE STRAITS: Brothers in Arms

Produced by Mark Knopfler and Neil Dorfsman

Released: 1985

Coming three years after the progressive jazz-rock opus Love Over Gold and riding the success of the enormous hit "Money for Nothing", Brothers in Arms would do for Mark Knopfler what Born in the USA had done for Bruce Springsteen: turn a guy in his mid-30s into a pop idol. It was done in a similar fashion too, with finely-crafted songs embellished with a timely pop sensibility.

The album is dominated by "Money for Nothing", the sardonic indictment of the MTV generation delivered from a disgruntled punter's point of view and driven by a distorted guitar riff Knopfler borrowed from Billy Gibbons. The irony that it was sung by a balding Scottish Jew who hadn't made his first record until he was 30 wasn't lost on the audience, but no one cared. "Money for Nothing" was such a huge hit and so clever a song that it could have over-shadowed everything else on the album had Brothers in Arms not been by Dire Straits. Because it was, most of the other tracks assert themselves just as well. On the opener "So Far Away" they return to the blues they cut their teeth on; "Walk of Life" is a feel-good 12-bar boogie with an enormous sing-along hook. The band's jazz inflections emerge in the smoky ballad "Your Latest Trick" and "Why Worry" rings with the tones of the steel-bodied National guitar on the album's cover. "Ride Across the River" featuring jungles sounds and tribal beats is one of the strongest tracks, the first of a suite of songs in which the various wars in Central America are used almost as a metaphor for his parents' experiences as Holocaust refugees. The title cut rounds these out, and thus also the album, in a manner reminiscent of "Private Investigations" but far more spiritual.

Brothers in Arms was one of the biggest albums of the 1980s, and as one of the decade's best, deservedly so.

1. So Far Away
2. Money For Nothing
3. Walk of Life
4. Your Latest Trick
5. Why Worry
6. Ride Across the River
7. Man's Too Strong
8. One World
9. Brothers in Arms

Rating: 95%