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MATTHEW: Dire Straits (1978, UK #5, US #2, Top Ten in nine nations, #1 in two of them, sold 10m): 8/10. Put simply, I like how you can get lost in them. I like their cinematic moodiness and how the average running time of a typical track is a fulsome 5 minutes allowing for complete headphone immersion. Fact is Mark Knopfler’s virtuosic skills have never been the most appealing thing about Dire Straits for me nor the magnetic force that made me want to listen it’s always just been the songs themselves. Which is to say that while I’m appreciative of great playin’, elongated solos generally aren’t my thing. Okay true confession I am not a guitar aficionado. They aren’t one of my all-time favorite bands…but I do genuinely like them. HOPE: I have a weird relationship with Dire Straits. And maybe that would be the case, were our opinions matched by those of most record-buyers and music critics-who helped make one of those six records, Brothers in Arms, responsible for a third of the band’s 100 million worldwide album sales. MATTHEW: With a catalogue of only six studio albums-and not a single one of them bad-Dire Straits may seem like an easy band to chat about and rate (hey, we just wrote 16k words rating the entire Macca catalog so we deserve a break! Read that here). Here’s Mark Knopfler shredding, just because… Our opinions will diverge at points from both each other and maybe the world at large but we are united in appreciation of the behemoth known as Dire Straits. Our album rating system is the classic best of 10, the pinnacle being 10 (it’s brilliant ), the bottom being 1 (it’s terrible). The Game Commences: Just a note on the format of this essay, Matthew and I are going to be taking turns offering up our Dire assessments and our names will appear before our respective comments. Welcome to the latest installment of this madness, This Is My Investigation where we will attempt to rumble through and rate the discography of dad rock kingpins Dire Straits.
#THE BEST DIRE STRAITS ALBUM SERIES#
Matthew Restall, author of the brilliant Blue Moves book in the 33 1/3 series & I (Hope) have a running list of artists whose respective catalogues we want to break down (figuratively) because our commitment to nerdiness is boundless.