The Police, Ghost In The Machine
Featured Album
A bleak vision of a stark future
A concept album with an iconic cover: three primitive digital-looking representations of the band members (I believe that left to right, it's Summers, Sting and Copeland). Anyway you slice it, it's a bit ahead of its time in its theme: a complaint about media overload ("Too Much Information") more than a decade before the Internet would become the centerpiece of planetary communication and knowledge. Heck, the Sony Walkman hadn't been invented yet. But the Caribbean-soul horns on the track represented a new wrinkle. "Rehumanize Yourself" was about the debilitating effects of work; though true to its time, the central image is the soul-numbing effect of "working all day in the factory." That's hardly the case in the western world these days, so it's a reminder to be careful what you wish for.
The album was recorded at AIR Studios in Montserrat, and the album's biggest hit, "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic," captures the mood of an isolated but posh Caribbean resort island, complete with steel drums. Synthesizer sounds generate reggae beach visions on the seductive opener "Spirits in the Material World." Summers gets to inject some uncharacteristic but appealing metal riffs on "Demolition Man," while "One World (Not Three)" is a dub-heavy track that that flourishes in Copeland's rocksteady hands. Sting's swing to topical lyrics is represented by "Invisible Sun." One of the Police's best tunes, the pained verses giving way to a hopeful bridge. Relying heavily on synthesizer, its message was inspired by martyrdom of Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands, who died the result of a hunger strike in a British prison in 1981.
