Critic's evaluation
Six years after Down The Road Wherever, singer Mark Knopfler, known for being the voice of Dire Straits, has announced new studio material. Entitled One Deep River, it's the tenth solo album from the Scot, who will turn 75 in 2024.
It's like feeling the freshness of the wind under your cheek and your hair waltzing in tune with its melody. The sky is a setting landscape, with its beautifully mystical tones painting the horizon. The road is empty in a kind of invigorating, but at the same time, exhilarating silence. Freedom is available just as the highway opens its path to the new and unknown. This is the imagery promoted by the synchronicity between Richard Bennett's guitar and Ian Thomas' drums, instruments that promote softness and contagious touches of a fluid torpor with flirtations in the reggae structure. Then Mark Knopfler comes along and makes his guitar stand out in the melody with a calm, velvety riff on its adorably swinging blues base. Knopfler's deep voice is laced with a sour treble, and he begins to draw out the lyrical content as the song matures in its cool linearity around his swinging reggae blues. Two Pairs Of Hands, based on this melodic structure, comes as a kind of reflection, of high thoughts, of observations made by Mark Knopfler himself about himself and his wisdom in handling the guitar. It's not just a sanctification of music as the first art, but the way it makes Knopfler and all listeners around the world feel. Two Pairs Of Hands, therefore, is a veneration of music, the guitar and the way in which, together, they make the notion of time fade away.
It's like walking unpretentiously along the side of a highway in the light of a setting spring sun. While the tall grass waltzes to the beat of the wind, the bucolic, inland scent comes like a natural perfume from the environment. This comforting scenery is imagistically born in the listener's eyes from a guitar that comes with a velvety riff in its adorably folk-like sharpness. Despite being in the spotlight, the instrument is accompanied by a base designed by drums that parade a gentle rhythm until Glenn Worf's bass enters. With a low body, but still blunt in its growing punctuations, it is he who receives a vocal with a low, slightly nasal tone. It's Knopfler giving Ahead Of The Game an extension of the folk aesthetic ambience already introduced. Fresh and infectious in its linearity, the song seems to talk about Knopfler's own experience of leaving home in search of his dream. Years after crossing the River Tyne bridge in search of the unknown, with the marks of age and a life well experienced, he decides to return to his roots, where it all began. A place where he can be himself and, as the name of the song suggests, be ahead of the game, in control of his own destiny. Growing timidly in harmony during the bridge, a moment when the subtle sharpness of Jim Cox's keyboard makes its presence felt in the soundtrack, Ahead Of The Game is about following your dreams, but knowing when it's time to come home.
The grass follows the waltz of the wind, while the first signs of the sun can be seen on the horizon beyond the mountains. This climate of extreme serenity is provided by a calm, gentle and densely soft melody in its almost acoustic folk vein. With the aromatic and floral notes of the piano flying over the subtly swinging base of the drums, Smart Money features Greg Leisz's lap steel guitar as an ingredient that adds a generously bucolic touch to the atmosphere, which is visualized by the listener as a typical country town in the United States. Pleasantly contagious in its aesthetic simplicity, Smart Money seems to talk about the phases of success, about how money is a kind of status of fame and how the spotlight is able to guide the attention of the masses towards the figures highlighted by showbiz.
It's curious. After all, only from the acoustic guitar, in its truncated riff, can the listener visualize a sunny and reenergizing dawn. Surprised by a sensual, provocative and playful scream from the electric guitar in the transition between the intro and the first verse, the song gains generous doses of swing with its aesthetic softness and its sweet and slightly acidic base provided by the keyboard. Managing to mix swing and freshness through the fusion of hard rock, blues and folk, Scavengers Yard has a lyrical structure steeped in storytelling techniques as it captures the listener's attention with its striking storyline. Like another important song from One Deep River, Scavengers Yard also features progressive refinements and experimentation with interesting textures that leave the velvet, pass through the torpor and reach the energetic in a sharp and consistent instrumental synchrony. It is with this soundtrack that Knopfler tells the story of a greedy salesman in a western region. A lawless and rulerless environment where savagery roars and shapes all interpersonal relationships.
John McCusker's communion of violins introduces a softly melancholy waltz like a rainy sky on a winter's afternoon. With the acoustic guitar flying over the surface layer of the melody, something touching and lucid is glimpsed amid the tears proposed by the weeping and suffering beginning of the sound. With its touching architecture, including Knopfler's lyrical interpretation, Black Tie Jobs manages to exude ample nostalgia as it presents the story of a couple who separate due to excessive rigidity. As the first official ballad on the album, Black Tie Jobs offers a perfect and curious metaphor between the black tie suit and the serious and rigid behavior it instills in its offspring of followers. A behavior that, in the plot, can be crucial to the maintenance or destruction of a relationship. It's no surprise, then, that the melody responds to this unknown by becoming melodramatic as it moves towards a sighing end.
The clouds take on different shades as the darkness of the night slowly dissipates. As the sun rises over the horizon, its soft light, responsible for the first signs of morning light, transforms the atmosphere into a mystical, psychedelic setting. Such a scenario arises in the listener's mind thanks to the chorus of female voices by Tamsin Topolski and Emma Topolski that flies over the room with a soft acidic sweetness. Flowing to a rhythm that is still serene but fresh in its sinisterness, the song mixes elements of folk with indie rock as Knopfler tells the true story of a gang of brothers involved in an unsuccessful robbery involving four deaths in 1923. Even so, it's interesting to see how the sound of Tunnel 13 softens the tragedy as it takes on curiously more Celtic silhouettes in its traditional folk feel. Thus, the song becomes a kind of medieval fable about two men from the criminal world who find a quick and sudden end to their own illicit activities.
Its beginning is soft and serene, like warm sunlight on a spring dawn. With a carefully delicate and aromatic linearity, the song is adorned by a velvet bed provided by the keyboard, which sounds so light that it's hard to detect it among the other sound elements. This is how Janine, a song that tells of the transformation of a city over the years, has nostalgic qualities as it moves between past and present with a simple air of regret and even fear. A fear of the change in the tranquil aura of a peaceful town.
Its beginning is fresh, soft and with a densely nostalgic depth. Amidst the acoustic base, the lap steel guitar stands out, giving the sound a pleasantly Hawaiian beach vibe. As soon as there is a silence, communicating the end of the introduction and, consequently, allowing the first verse to begin, Knopfler emerges with his tone a little lower, while the drums delimit the soft rhythmic beat. Becoming a contagious folk product, Watch Me Gone ends up exuding, along with the nostalgia already detected, a kind of loving melancholy that is touching. You can find a lot of familiarity between this song and Ahead Of The Game, but unlike the latter, the former revels in sighs of fear and insecurity, but above all, gratitude. Watch Me Gone, therefore, is a farewell to childhood and the bucolic, while listening to those voices that come from within the unconscious indicating the path, the direction, the destination to be followed. The touching verses "and the hopscotch traces, well, you can still see 'em here the chalk lines faded and unclear" and "time for me to disappear" give the listener the conscious and inevitable realization that the song is about chasing dreams, saying goodbye and coming of age. About leaving the nest and following one's own course. A great ballad from One Deep River.
Flashes of light break through the darkness of the night. As the sunlight appears in the distance on the horizon, the scene begins to show its silhouettes in the gloom. One of them stands out as it moves slowly. On the dirt road next to the lawn of the infinitely long field, a man walks with a slight hunch, but with his head held high and his eyes fixed on what lies beyond. His face is tired, but his mind is working tirelessly, taking away any possibility of relaxation. Deceiving himself, the wanderer hums along to the rhythm of his steps, acting as the only sound in the whole environment that is still in the process of waking up. With a curiously transcendental atmosphere through the tinkling sonars provided by Guy Fletcher's synthesizer, Knopfler's voice is positioned at the melodic forefront as the element to gain absolute prominence. In this way, like Tunnel 13, Sweeter Than The Rain ends up taking on a fabulous, Celtic lyrical aesthetic as its plot reveals a story of guilt, evil, rape and overcoming pain. It's rain as a purifying remedy for an impossibly dirty and repugnant past.
Its beginning is gradual. Serene in its tactile delicacy, the introduction is governed by an honest simplicity and, in a curious way, linear harmony. In the meantime, the listener is graced by sudden and interestingly comfortable feelings of nostalgia. With the guitar as the main element amidst the rest of the sound ingredients, Before My Train Comes has a strong farewell taste that is exuded by its folk energy, which is different from that experienced in previous albums. With a similar storyline to Ahead Of The Game and Watch Me Gone, this song seems to unquestionably bring together the duality of emotions felt by Knopfler when deciding the course of his own future. The unknown and fear. The familiar and comfort. The initial loneliness and the maternal and paternal presence as foundations. The verse "sad to be leaving for somewhere without a goodbye" shows Knopfler silencing, denying and censoring with all his might the tears of farewell as a self-defense against the pain of leaving, which could culminate in a sudden sense of giving up.
The setting is rainy and monochromatic in its grayish tone. Although delicate and subtle, the introductory melody doesn't hide the melancholy essence present in the introduction. It's not surprising that, in the midst of the aesthetic linearity, there are tactile refinements of instrumental serenity, with the keyboard offering compassion and an encouraging embrace. Reflective and mournful in tone, This One's Not Going To End Well seems to tell of the beginning of turmoil, chaos, anarchy and a kind of dissynchronous uprising towards nowhere, but obeying the commands of the debauched, the cynical and the satirical.
Soft, touching, melodic, transcendental. Gentle in its polite simplicity, the introduction not only features the blues as a melodic motto, but offers an unbridled sense of well-being that infects the listener with large doses of a pleasant numbness. It's interesting to realize, as the song progresses, that the scenery can be multiplied, from the last touch of hands in a final farewell to the pure, natural landscape of the sun hiding behind the hills and letting the stars begin to shine and delicately illuminate the evening. The aforementioned touchiness becomes more present as the guitar explores its velvet in sync with the backing vocals, a union that builds a harmony of floral scent and extreme subtlety. It has a slow melodic cadence, deliberately designed to capture the hearts of the listener, whose eyes are tingled and completely taken aback by the sonic sensitivity explored in the song. This is how the title track presents itself: as a kind of mantra, a prayer, a dialog with an individual who is disconnected from his earthly body and has now become omnipresent. The title track is like a thank you, a reverence for the legacy of an artist whose songs will continue to resonate around the world for eternity.
It's classic material. Capable of mixing experimentation and traditionalism in a balanced way, but without losing sight of the complexity associated with the simplicity of its melodic-sensitive cohesion and structural consistency. One Deep River comes as a material that, between autobiographical narratives, brings Mark Knopfler back to a past of self-repressed emotions that can now finally be properly felt.
Full of charm, the album shows delicacy and sensitivity through melodies that move freely between complexity and linearity. A sound of such different elements that it can capture the listener both by heart and ear through its wide-ranging textures.
From velvet to acid. From torpor to rationality. From the comings and goings between past and present. Refined in its entirety, One Deep River is not only full of sonic textures provided by the insertion of different musical genres into the melodic recipe. It is a material in which the guitar is the star and it is the guitar that has dense and refined layers that blend in with the delicate ambiences provided by the other sound elements.
Deep in its lyricism that dialogues with a poignant air about goodbyes, as happens in tracks like Watch Me Gone and Before My Train Comes, the album also entangles itself between Celtic folk ambiences as in Tunnel 13 and Sweeter Than The Rain. Two Pairs Of Hands, Ahead Of The Game, Janine and the title track round off the list of the album's standout songs.
This last group is due to its level of contagion, nostalgia, sensitivity and harmonic grandeur. These make One Deep River not only charming, but fine, elegant and well-structured between its transitions of folk and blues textures with transcendental touches. And this was an important move on Fletcher's part.
The musician, who was also responsible for the mixing and, alongside Knopfler, the production, made the album sound mature, broad, delicate and immersive in its lyrical and sensitive proposals. Through his engineering activity, each instrument can be graced and each sound melisma can be detected, allowing the listener a profusion of sensations and aromas.
Released on 04/12/2024 via EMI, One Deep River is a deep and autobiographical piece of lyricism. With delicate, charming and fine melodies. A product that captivates with its aesthetic simplicity converted into precision and consistency, which knows how to dialog with the emotions of the past and the present. In One Deep River, Mark Knopfler has finally allowed himself to feel what he has been hiding for a long time.
