A Year of Blind Spots: Brothers in Arms

I hate that most of these Saturday "Blind Spots" posts are centered around the "expectations vs. what I discovered" idea, as if anyone could be interested in my expectations and how they differ from reality. I feel ya. I'm more enamored with the idea of posting something on PoYB every Saturday for the rest of my life than I am excited at the prospect of having to grind out 200 words about some fucking classic rock album that I'm supposedly already obligated to be familiar with.

So please excuse me when I tell you for what feels like the 89th week in a row that this album, Dire Straights' Brothers in Arms, was not what I expected. I don't even know what I expected, to be honest. Maybe my expectations were based on my limited knowledge of "Money for Nothing"—the Sting cameo, the badass spacey intro leading into a ZZ Top-esque rocker, the homophobic slur used and then repeated—but, like, the rest of Brothers in Arms is nothing like that.

For one, the song after "Money for Nothing" is "Walk of Life," which is a song I did not recognize in name, but when that opening riff came on my iPod for the first time, I was like: "Holy shit, this song is Dire Straights?!" You know how it goes. And "Walk of Life," in terms of sound and theme and emotion, is the exact opposite of "Money for Nothing." The sequence of one after the other on this tracklist proves almost immediately that Dire Straights have some fucking range.

And then—for another—that range is pretty much pissed away for the remainder of the album. I wouldn't say the back half of Brothers in Arms is "bad," but it's so different than both "Walk of Life" and "Money for Nothing" that I can't help but be disappointed. "Why Worry" and "Ride Across the River" are back-to-back and are over fifteen minutes long in combination, but it feels like much longer. Like, if "Walk of Life" supposedly could play over the credits of every movie, then these other two songs feel like they could score the length of an entire movie. A bad movie. And all this after the schmaltzy saxophone jazz of "Your Latest Trick," not exactly a barnburner itself.

And, I dunno, the last three songs are fine, I guess. They kinda sound like outtakes from The Wall at certain points, heavy on that "hiding behind this wall I built" glumness without any of the dramatics that make that Pink Floyd masterpiece a classic.

Most likely, many of these "Blind Spots" albums require more than one week to digest (what up, Madvillain). Maybe I'm missing something on Brothers in Arms beyond the MTV dramatics and buoyant joy of those two hits. Or maybe Dire Straights really did only have two bullets in the arsenal. In any case, this was not what I expected—but in a bad way.