The Police — Synchronicity (Super Deluxe Edition)
Qobuz reissue review (July 2024)
For large swaths of Gen X, Synchronicity was a landmark album, not solely due to its omnipresence on radio and MTV but also because the album was a little scary. Whether it was monsters and aching eyeballs (“Synchronicity II”), actresses under duress (“Miss Gradenko”), mass extinction events and the existential crises they evoke (“Walking in Your Footsteps”), stalkers (“Every Breath You Take”), or, of course, mommy issues (“Mother”), the lyrical approach for the album (and, in the case of “Mother,” everything else, too), bundled up all the postmodern anxieties of ’80s adults and delivered them to kids who maybe just wanted a follow-up to “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” Synchronicity definitely was not that, but instead seemed like a buffet of nightmare material that just happened to be catchy as hell. While Ghost in the Machine found the group streamlining their sound into something that was less tetchy and more accessible than their earliest albums, with Synchronicity, it was clear that this was not a path the band had any interest in pursuing further. While the album continued to downplay (to the point of near-elimination) the reggae influences that made the group so distinctive early in their career, it also continued to expand their sonic palette with synths and orchestration. On Ghost, these new sounds were deployed in the interest of smoothing out the band’s more arch edges, while on Synchronicity, all the experimentation seems designed to unsettle the listener. And it is an unsettling album, not just because of its lyrics, but also due omnipresent taut tension in the music that was, obviously, a side effect of the intrapersonal and creative unease within the Police (which also led to an approach that found each of the three members challenging each other to greatness).
The result was one of the weirdest mainstream albums ever, as thick with references to Jungian psychology as it was with indelible hooks and virtuosic musicianship. It’s also a profoundly pretentious album that manages to make good on its pretense while still yielding surprises and satisfaction decades later — something that can be said of few of its contemporaries. This long-awaited deluxe edition fully rounds out the Synchronicity experience, with studio tracks that didn’t make the LP cut, but are still just as thematically resonant; the CD/cassette bonus track “Murder By Numbers” sounds like it could have been a Zenyatta Mondatta leftover, but it’s about serial killers, while “Once Upon A Daydream” jauntily addresses abortion and killing a father-in-law, saying it’s “no place for sentiment.” Yikes! Meanwhile, “Every Bomb You Make,” the parody track from the British satirical puppet show Spitting Image that somehow managed to get Sting to sing on, is both on-the-nose ridiculous and also a reminder of how anxious and earnest the mid-’80s were. Additionally, there are dozens of demos and alternate versions, and a previously unreleased live show from Oakland during the Synchronicity tour.
