Climbing Up an Endless Wall

The Police : No Time This Time

[Purchase]

On October 2, 1979 The Police released Reggatta de Blanc, their second album and first to top the U.K. charts. This is my favorite of their albums, made up mostly of straight ahead rockers and a few reggae numbers. For some reason my high school band even covered Stewart Copeland's "On Any Other Day".

The band entered Surrey Studios in February of 1979 to begun recording the album. They would return again in September to wrap it up. The studio was not expensive and Copeland, wary of how band's can so easily go into debt,  made the call. The trio did not have a lot of songs on hand. While Sting wrote most of the songs on the debut, he only has 5 songs that he penned by himself. 

"It's a fair representation of the band's vitality," he told Smash Hits," that everybody's contributing, so we started splitting it three ways this time".

On to the reviews.

Robert Christgau gave Reggatta de Blanc the lowest rating of any Police album, a B-. He writes:

The idea is to fuse Sting's ringing rock voice and the trio's aggressive, hard-edged rock attack with a less eccentric version of reggae's groove and a saner version of reggae's mix. To me the result sounds half-assed. And though I suppose I might find the "synthesis" innovative if I heard as much reggae as they do in England, it's more likely I'd find it infuriating.

  And from Rolling Stone's Debra Rae Cohen:


Nothing on this LP is as instantly catchy as last year's "Roxanne," with its introductory giggle and pop-harmony chorus, but almost all the compositions capture you eventually. Constructing and repeating terse, rhythmic hooks, Sting, Stewart, Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers set up patterns and crosscurrents like body builders training side by side. Songs, whether reggae or rock, rarely end. Instead, they build through chanty choruses, shift tempo and fade away

The album would finish #35 on the Village Voice Pazz and Jop critics poll and #24 on the NME year ender.