This is the Police album that I had on one side of a C90 cassette tape, with Reggatta De Blanc on the other, and it takes me to a particular time and place near around 1989 when my family had just moved to a bigger house, sleeping in a room with just bare floorboards but a long summer ahead, between Sixth Form College and University.
I think it’s the better album, with the tunes less easy to categorise. Only Tea In The Sahara bears any traces of reggae to it, but stripped back to a minimalist beat and almost impressionist elements from Copeland and Sting. The other tracks tend towards working off a repeated motif, almost like the jazz of Monk, or the later Miles Davis albums. This is true of the racing, interlaced synth patterns that drive Synchronicity I, or the looseness of Oh My God.
The second side, to my mind, carries the better songs – Every Breath You Take, King Of Pain, Wrapped Around Your Finger – which have justifiably stood the test of time. Every Breath may be driven by the deceptively simple bassline and the lyrics that are more sinister than some make them but it still works, while King Of Pain is pleasingly complex lyrically - “There’s a little black spot on the sun today”. Sting plays around with notions of the paranormal and of the Jungian subconsciousness, merged in the track Synchronicity II where a man’s growing stress at factors in his life seemingly are tied to the Loch Ness Monster emerging from the depths, a distant echo of his hidden anger.
Sting takes the bulk of the writing duties, but Copeland provides the pleasantly syncopated Miss Gradenko while Summers provides the demented fairground chaos that is Mother, shrieking like early Bryan Ferry about a domineering mother (giving shades of Norman Bates). You’ll either love it or hate it, but it’s the kind of craziness that’s right up my street, and I still liked it some 35 years down the line.
The same, I think, could be said for the album – it still stands up; I do wonder if sometimes a band produces its strongest works in times of inner turmoil – The Police split shortly after this and the production was fraught at times. For maximum effect, though, you need the CD / Cassette release that includes Murder By Numbers as the final track.
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