Nashville’s Long Players are an album band, even if the albums they perform aren’t their own. The Police were not. With a slew of KILLER singles, Sting & Co. reigned the top 40 with their idiosyncratic conflation of new wave, white reggae, choruses that sound nothing like their preceding verses and WASP-y good looks out of Hitler’s wet dreams. But they never had a London Calling or a Ziggy Stardust or a Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, as each of their records was sullied by too much hackneyed filler. (How a song like Andy Summers’ “Mother” made it onto the A-side of Synchronicity will boggle the minds of music listeners for generations.) Their closest call with consistency came on their 1977 debut Outlandos d’Amour, a record that — before their cool-crippling discovery of synthesizers, jazz-fusion and octabongs — captured the band’s lightning-in-bottle chemistry and raw frenetic energy, before it vanished up the suppurating asshole of Sting’s ego. Classics such as “Roxanne” and “So Lonely,” along with cuts like “Next to You” and “Truth Hits Everybody,” will sound great under the surgical focus of the LPs. Plus, watching drummer Steve Ebe do Stewart Copeland is worth the price of admission alone.
Sat., April 3, 9 p.m., 2010
Sat., April 3, 9 p.m., 2010
