“Outlandos d’ Amour” Review

All the girls (and one tenth of the boys) wanted “Outlandos d’Amour” with these three pretty boys.

1) Next To You; 2) So Lonely; 3) Roxanne; 4) Hole In My Life; 5) Peanuts; 6) Can’t Stand Losing You; 7) Truth Hits Everybody; 8) Born In The 50’s; 9) Be My Girl – Sally; 10) Masoko Tanga.

8 out of 10

“The Police” debuted in 1978 with this album that was punky enough to place them in the leagues of the tamer, lamer punk bands, reggae enough to please Peter Tosh fans and Sting enough to please any fan of excessive yoga and meditation. It also has a really stupid name and I hate it. It gets 8 out of 10.

All right lets pull back for a moment and examine the above paragraph and its implications. I actually stand by all those statements (except the hating it thing) but still find the album to be a solid, fun but rough debut from a young (ha!) promising (definitely) band. Even if it has Sting in it.

Basically, the band emphasizes the pure rock side of their playing on this album more than on any other album while synthesizing it with more “mellow” reggae sounds. This potentially creates a situation where the sound will please fans of neither style but the band pulls off a nice coup by highlighting the strengths of both punk and reggae and minimizing the negatives.

“Next to You” starts the album with wild bashing drums, Sting trying to sound like a punk (he doesn’t fail but he isn’t that convincing) and the guitar and bass synching up in a great guitar groove. The arrangement is a little more diversified when compared to an average punk song but it’s still pretty simple.

It’s really the vocal and guitar melodies as well as the pure energy that make it work: the chorus is an excellent example of Sting’s once promising musical mind. When he wails “What can I dooo oooo…all I want is to be next to you!” backed by Summer’s guitar punctuations, the melody is forever stuck in your head.

“Peanuts” is another fairly punky song that seems to have nothing to do with peanuts until Sting inexplicably starts shouting “Peanuts! Peeeenuuuts!” at the end of the song. Not one of the best songs on the album (it’s a bit too shallow melodically) but it has a great drive to it.

“Truth Hits Everybody” is another excellent rocker that features hard hitting guitar lines, excellent drumming (listen to Stewart pounding the toms here) with dramatic pauses, slow downs and a frantic rush to the end. The sustained chords during “truth hits everybody…the truth hits everyone” are genius. So is the weird tolling bell just before Summer’s simple, but desperate guitar solo.

The last hard rocking tune is “Born in the 50’s” which is pretty weak: Mellencamp weak. The lyrics are pretentious, generic and arrogant. If Sting was trying to mock his generation’s self-righteous self-entitled attitude he did a good job. However, given his usual level of self involvement and egoism I can only assume (because I want to and because it’s funny) that he is not.

Next, we have the reggae stuff. I’m really reluctant to call most of this stuff reggae. For example, “Roxanne” is actually a tango. And it’s ridiculously catchy with an excellent, swinging vocal melody. The chorus is immortal but it’s repeated 80 times in the song. I find this to be a weakness: doesn’t “Roxanne…put on the red light! Roxanne…put on the red light! Roxanne…put on the red light! Roxanne…put on the red light!” get a little annoying after awhile?

“So Lonely” is much more reggae but still has a punchy rock chorus, with the title “So Lonely” repeated about a gagillion times.

And that’s what makes this band great: they combine reggae and punk in a way that feels organic. The chorus (as well as the slow down and the rave up at the end) help create dynamics that expand the song beyond its repetitive reggae rhythm and its generic guitar racket.

“Hole in My Life” is the closest to pure reggae on the album with a relaxed vibe and slightly desperate feel. But what’s up with that weird piano sound at the end of the song? Or the excellent vocalization and variations in the melodies. Not my favorite song on the album but solid nonetheless.

“Can’t Stand Losing You” is a song I sometimes get confused with “Roxanne” for the first few bars. However, I like this song better: the lyrics are more interesting, the weird mid-section features odd synthesizers and Sting going “oh!” and it features the line “I guess you’d call it suicide/but I’m too full to swallow my pride” which is ridiculous.

It also has a really repetitive chorus which uses only the words in the title. That’s true of just about every song. Sting tries to get around it by varying the vocal melodies with different intonations and phrasing and it works a lot of the time. It probably works best at the end of this song because it’s such a desperate song and the repetitions feel more like desperate pleas than desperate attempts by Sting to make his song over two minutes long.

I suppose you could say “Roxanne” is desperate too but the chorus is more annoying to me phonetically.

Following the slight gaffe of “Born in the 50’s” we have a major gaffe in the Sting/Summers co-written “Be My Girl – Sally.” The first part is obviously a Sting invention: it has a great guitar groove and a nice vocal melody that gets repeated over and over again as do the lyrics “won’t you be my girl” in as many possible variations as Sting can manage.

However, Summers decided to throw in a tune called “Sally” which is…odd. It’s a lot of semi-dissonant piano playing backing Summers reciting (as Britishly as possible) a poem about falling in love with a blow up doll. It’s played for laughs but it’s somehow more laughable in a bad way played for laughs than when “Roxy Music” played it straight in “Every Dream Home a Heartache.” There, the song was desperate. Here it’s stupidly goofy. “Be My Girl” does come back to help create the sense that the song is complete but it doesn’t help much.

“Masoka Tanga” is a nice bass led jam (where Sting really shows off some awesome chops. No sarcasm, he plays his ass off) that has a semi-world music feel to it as Stewart bashes his drums and Andy keeps a simple rhythm. Sting intones a bunch of nonsense that he apparently came up with while hypnotized (yeah right) and it’s a fun, funny and energetic way to end the album.

I hate describing every song this way but on an album as filled with solid and diverse tunes as this, it’s hard not to go into that much detail. The band shows off a lot of songwriting strength and playing skills but were still pretty rough.

The choruses are way too repetitive often to the point of annoyance (a problem that always plagues Sting) the songwriting was a bit iffy (seriously, I can’t stand “Born in the 50’s” or “Be My Girl-Sally”) and the band seems a bit unsure playing pure rock and roll.

Plus, it’s called “Outlandos d’ Amour.” UGH! 0 out of 10!