Kill to Get Crimson: A Review

Posted on October 7, 2007

Kill to Get Crimson is Mark Knopfler’s sixth solo album, his first after 2004′s Shangri-La. I was not sure if I’d like it. His duet with Emmylou Harris was a disaster to me as a studio album. It is the only Knopfler album that didn’t stay on the CD player continuously for weeks after it’s release. This album is a fine return to form.

It is a mostly bleak album, with almost no uplifting songs, with the possible exceptions of True Love Will Never Fade and Punish the Monkey. Clocking in at a little less than an hour with twelve songs, the average length of a song is about four minutes. This implies that there are no searing guitar solos like Speedway at Nazareth. Knopfler was always a songwriter par excellence, whose writing skills were masked by his fluid and lyrical guitar play, especially during his Dire Straits days. From the very first self-titled album that gave “Sultans of Swing”, a song as amazing for its guitar work as its lyrics to his latest release, his song writing has constantly impressed me. Reducing massive tomes such as Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon to a six minute song, “Sailing to Philadelphia”, chronicling the rise of McDonalds in Shangri-La’s “Boom Like That” or capturing the nuances of the lives of black gospel singers in a racially divided south in “Baloney Again” or penning a crime cum social commentary about the lives of coal workers in “5.15 am”, his song writing skills have continued to evolve brilliantly. He writes multi-layered songs that tell an intimate personal story while capturing a social milieu and talk of matters eternal such as the price of success, the results of the choices of a lifetime and of the desire for connection.

The first song off the album, “True Love Will Never Fade” can be read as a straight forward narrative about a tatoo artist and his unrequited love for one of the women who has him tatoo her shoulder. At another level, it’s about hope, of everlasting love. A tatoo is usually considered a permanent mark of a temporary insanity. Knopfler in this song turns that cynicism into hope, hope that it will be a permanent mark of an everlasting insanity. But the way he repeats the line “True Love Will Never Fade” can also be construed as a sign of his lack of belief in that very notion, repeated to reinforce the idea, an attempt to hold cognitive dissonance at bay. At yet another level, it’s about our making a mark in the world (tatoo is making a mark on a body) and the hope that whatever we do with true love, will remain a sign of us. I like the way he phrases “Any which way we’re all shuffling, forward in the queue” to say that every day, we all take a step towards death.

Many fans and critics complain that there are no guitar epics in his later albums. A guitar epic would seem a little out of place in this album. It’s about ordinary people coming to terms with their life, about people whose life never got on the success track, was shunted to a bleak sideyard. A long guitar solo such as in the one in Speedway at Nazareth or Telegraph Road would seem out of place. This is no “Fanfare for the Common Man”. What we get instead are vignettes into people’s lives, words perfectly crafted by this word pecker. These are little gems, wonderfully crafted offbeat short stories instead of an 800 page novel.

I have never liked his folkish songs such as “Donkeytown” in “All The Road Running” or “Stand Up Guy” in Shangri-La. They seemed boring to me. Starting with chords that sound similar to “Stand Up Guy”, Knopfler crafts a brilliant song about the life of a pawn store owner in “Heart Full of Holes”. Knopfler constantly evolves sounds in each album, until he hits the perfect pitch. Similar sounding songs from previous albums seem a preparation for “Heart Full of Holes”. Written like a simple folk song, it is much more. When the narrator talks of his shops filled with belongings of people long dead and gone, the simple ditty turns into a macabre funeral music, reminding me of the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony. I liked his reasoning about going to heaven in this song:

Well, if we go to heaven
And some say we don’t
but if there’s a reckoning day
please God, I’ll see you
and maybe I won’t
I’ve a bag packed to go either way

Secondary Waltz is another strange offbeat song, about a boxer reminiscing of his school days where he was taught the waltz by a strict discplinarian, taught on the gymanasium floor, typically also where one learns to box. The boxer sings:

When you come to my fights
and I’m under the lights
and you see that my footwork is false
don’t count me out
at the start of the bout
I’m just doing the Secondary Waltz

Another example of multi-layered writing, this can be read as a song about ingrained habits, especially those learnt very early.

He writes about the life of mismatched people who fall in love in “The fish and the bird”:

The fish and the bird
Who fall in love
will find no place to build a home in
The fish and the bird who fall in love
are bound forever to go roam

This is among the most evocative songs he’s penned.

Some critics complain that Knopfler has settled into a comfortable groove, never changing his style or pacing, penning nothing new. Others complain that he’s turned into someone who writes boring music. I see him as a musician who’s digging deep and is peeling the layers of onion away to reveal the hidden core, like the boatman in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha who sees in the unchanging river the lessons of a lifetime. The songs are different enough to be interesting while also remaining unchanged in their unique guitaring and singing style. For example, the music in this album have strange time signatures such as being in 6/8 or 3/4 time. While the album is somewhat reminiscent of The Ragpicker’s Dream, the comparison is justified only in the mood of the songs and the pacing. There are no country music tunes like Quality Shoes or blues tunes such as Marbletown. There is more British music in here and very little American influence. If that album was about the consequences of choosing to wander, this album is about the consequences of choosing to stay.

“We Can Get Wild”, “Punish The Monkey” and “Behind With The Rent” are about as fast as songs get in this album, all mid-tempo at best. Punish The Monkey is the weakest song w.r.t lyrics, but quite catchy and quirky musically. This is the first album since the eponymous debut album of Dire Straits where there is no title track, though the line “Kill to Get Crimson” is in the song “Let It All Go”, about the life of a painter in a foreign land during World War II. The song is slightly reminiscent of “In The Gallery” from the debut album of Dire Straits in its theme. The only song that didn’t work it’s magic on me is the second song, “The Scaffolder’s Wife”, though I don’t always skip it when playing the album.

In an interview a long time ago, Knopfler said that he likes to write blues that wouldn’t be played on a blues station, country that would similarly not be played on a country station. He’s looking for that no man’s land, where boundaries are blurred, musical genres blend, reflecting off each other’s influence instead of the compartmentalized music that we get from most artists. He delivers on that promise again in this album.