When the World is Running Down, You Make the POLL of What's Still Around – ILM Artist Poll #116 – THE POLICE - (Voting extended to Friday, Dec 2, 2022)

Something crawls to the surface
Of a dark Scottish LOCH

Props to Sting for (sorta) rhyming with "crotch."

Synchronicity II also my top vote from that album (and the only one in my top 10).

Unintentional, no doubt, but I hear "S II" as The Police tipping the hat to Rush, who'd already mastered their own version of their sonics and skank on the previous year's Signals.

many miles away……

We know all the suicides are fake

I made a little playlist of the songs on my ballot and my main reaction listening to it is what a phenomenal groove band they were. Almost every song — especially the non-singles — is built on one great groove or another. Which is why for all the surface connections they are a much different proposition than Rush. The Police absorbed and understood the space and movement in reggae and dub better than maybe any contemporaries. (This was mostly gone by Synchronicity, one of the reasons it's my least favorite.)

"O My God" and maybe "Wrapped Around Your Finger" are the last gasps imo.

Yeah WAYF does have some of that slinky spaciness.

gotta say the live version of Walking In Your Footsteps is pretty great

I guess I'm the only one who much prefers "Synchronicity I" over "II"?

I just like the rush - also some amazing polyrhythms in there IIRC.

Logic so inflexible
Causally connectible

xxp nope, I vastly prefer it

I like the rush of "Sync I" and it's also maybe the most Rush-like thing they ever did. I can totally hear it in Geddy Lee's voice. (And Peart was into Jung, too.)

I had a professor in grad school who threatened to fail us if we cited Jung or Joseph Campbell in our papers.

re-humanties-ize yourself

I am very psyched for this rollout

xxp nope, I vastly prefer it

same

spotify stats:

https://i.ibb.co/LpywVF4/Screenshot-2022-11-28-184622.jpg

Surprising how steep the dropoffs can be, at least on the bottom end (like after "King of Pain," the next popular track gets less than half the plays).

as usual I am blown away by the orders of magnitude there re: most plays

lol yes xp

"EBYT" numbers truly astonishing

Glad "So Lonely" is so high. Did that have some afterlife I'm not aware of?

xpost I think it's a keystone of an earlier season of Stranger Things.

Ah that would make sense. Good call, Stranger Things.

Hello everyone, confirmation emails have not yet gone out but they are still coming. I got a bit lazy on my four day vacation. I have come back to work and I'm swamped and won't be able to run this thing this week like I had planned. It will run next week no matter what. Sorry but work is out of control at the moment.

Good news is if you still need to make a ballot then you may...up until Friday, December 2.

I think Wrapped Around Your Finger should be after King Of Pain in terms of total plays but I really don't understand Spotify's ordering mechanism sometimes

I like both "Synchronicity"s but consider the four songs in-between them a wasteland.

I remember a review of the 1986 Police compilation in the local alt-weekly that suggested that "Invisible Sun" was the only song on the record that wasn't about romantic issues but also wasn't a hit, thus undermining the band and their audience's pretensions to significance.

I mean, "Spirits in the Material" world isn't about romantic issues, and you'd be hard pressed to say "Don't Stand So Close to Me" is, either.

Wasn't Invisible Sun banned in the UK?

the video definitely was

according to that revolver interview anyway

I think "Russians" alone discouraged me from ever wanting Sting to write about something *important*. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate all he's done for charity, but he's recorded better songs for beer commercials.

We work the dark ale together

guys we don’t have to be cool. ebyt is a monster track with a sound that deservedly got ripped off immediately and for years. sync ii is… fine. it’s a good riff.

my biggest surprise listening back through everything was maybe “walking on the moon” which always bored me when I was young and foolish but wow… Stewart just absolutely kills it. up there with “in the air tonight” for lead drums.

they really got a lot of mileage out of reggae verse/rock chorus

I respect EBYT's many achievements and I voted for it (unlike some of the other big hits), but it's never been a personal fave.

And otm about the drums — the cymbals! — on "Walking on the Moon."

copeland is the best cymbalist in rock music

the fill that opens “every little thing she does is magic” is my personal fav moment among many

"On Any Other Day" would be in my top 10 were it not for the homophobic lyric

"It's All Right for You" is still a banger imo

the fill that opens “every little thing she does is magic” is my personal fav moment among many

― comedy khadafi (voodoo chili)

and the one before the EEEYOHHHH part.

Love the coda to that song as well

A lot of Police songs, I often have trouble figuring out the drum parts. There is a lot of overdubbing, a lot of effects, stuff like that that clutter up the performance. Depending on the song really. But Copeland is so creative in how he puts it all together that it really doesn't matter if he has two arms or four or six.

copeland is the best cymbalist in rock music

Hell yeah. I voted for Peter Gabriel's "Red Rain" in category three - apparently they hired Copeland just to play the hi-hat. Like they spent the money and flew him out just for that, and it opens both the song and the whole album.

(his hi-hat that is, it opens the track all by its lonesome)

I recall reading once that one of the pitches Lanois made is that after a couple albums of no or few cymbals, what if Gabriel did an album that was *all* high-end bright, with an *emphasis* on cymbals. Manu Katche did a pretty good job capturing Copeland's splashy expressiveness, but with more discipline. Copeland if I recall correctly plays hi-hat on Red Rain and most of the drums on Big Time, but that's it.

I also voted for the “Red Rain” hi-hat. His Sonic signature. Also otm about the Every Little Thing intro.