Description
Dire Straits Stretch Out With Extended, Ambitious Arrangements and Moody Atmospherics: Love Over Gold Mesmerizes With Tension, Contrast, Interplay, and Craftsmanship
Mobile Fidelity Hybrid SACD of Love Over Gold Touts Unsurpassed Spaciousness, Imaging, and Transparency: Mastered from the Original Tapes, Music Emerges With New Details and Tones
Love Over Gold Includes the Epic "Telegraph Road" and Aching "Private Investigations": Heartfelt Narrative Songs Steeped in Patience, Drama, Sadness, and Romance
Love Over Gold is all about contrast, tension, and crafty composition. Dire Straits' fourth album finds the band continuing to evolve by welcoming increasingly bold arrangements and exploring moody variations. Parts edgy and sharp, and part seductive and relaxed, the five lengthy songs on Love Over Gold sprawl out like a long, winding road cutting through a pastoral landscape. The addition of a new rhythm guitarist, Hal Lindes, encourages deeper atmospheric interplay while the presence of engineer Neil Dorfsman – his first appearance in what would be a long string of collaborations with Mark Knopfler – ensures stunning sonic properties that now come to life like never before.
Mastered from the original master tapes, Mobile Fidelity's hybrid SACD of Love Over Gold teems with superb balances, front-to-back soundstages, and crystalline purity. It brings forward previously obscured details, extra information, and mastering-studio-quality transients. The distinctive textures of a host of instruments – marimbas, acoustic and electric guitars, vibes, synthesizers – further enhance the ambitiousness of the 1982 album.
On this audiophile disc, everything Knopfler does seemingly turn to gold. Gearheads will hear the unique characteristics afforded by his use of a Mesa Boogie Mark II guitar amplifier (soon again employed on Brothers in Arms) and carefully chosen selection of Schecter Stratocasters, 1937 National steel guitar, and Ovation six- and twelve-string models. Reference-level separation and lifelike imaging place Knopfler and company in your room, while tube-like warmth, spaciousness, and airiness causes the music to breathe anew.
