Police

Outlandos D'amour

Proto-punk pop pleasure, from the once-greatest band around

Review Score:

(8/10)
As I listened to "Outlandos" on my iPod last night, after I dutifully purchased all of the newly remastered editions on CD, I felt the need to wax rhapsodic.
Listening to these impossibly crisp and detailed recordings, I remembered, as if it was yesterday, buying the LP. After "Ghost In The Machine", I had become a monstrous Police fan. I lived and breathed the Police. I went back and bought their first three records, and proceeded to memorize them.
This will not be an unbiased review.
I made a copy of the LP, on a cassette tape, Years later, when CDs came out, I repurchased the Police catalog, as I have with each remastering. The box set goes without saying. VHS tapes, laserdiscs, and now DVD's. I have listened to them in every conceivable media.
As the million-miles-an-hour "Next To You" opened the album, I was taken back to my high school and early college days. These guys were supposed to be punk, or punk-ish, but like The Clash, they threw more sounds...more textures into the mix. Sting occasionally sings with a tonsil-thrashing punk howl, but the airy voice always reverts to a classic melody some time before the final chorus. Andy Summers' guitars sounded like no one else at the time, and Stewart Copeland's polyphonic drumming put him head-and-shoulders above the DIY crowd.
Calming myself down just a bit, I must admit this is NOT a perfect record. "Masoko Tanga" sounds like three guys messing around in a studio with a tape running. The "Sally" interlude is funny the first few times, then gets kinda tedious. "Hole In My Life" is too long.
Who cares? "Next To You", "So Lonely" and the stone-cold-classic the first-time-you-heard-it "Roxanne" open the album in a way few debuts ever have. An instantly recognizable, commercial yet edgy, punk yet not punk, individual and unique, defiant statement proclaiming their arrival.
"Peanuts" ends side one in a manic flurry.
I could go on, about comparing the near-delicate guitar sounds in "So Lonely" to the beefy thrash in parts of "Born In The 50s", about the reggae-ification of beats that twisted conventional tunes into extraordinary ones, the nimble bass...
And this was just the beginning. The first of only five albums. The Police lit up the pop world for half a decade and then split. The three of them apart were never as potent as the three of them together, but seeing them together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony offered us a delicious, delirious reminder of their talent.

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