Mark Knopfler – Kill to Get Crimson

Because he writes mostly character-driven songs, it’s difficult to know just how much Mark Knopfler imbues a painter who lusts after more vivid colors in “Let It All Go” with his own attitudes and attributes. Yet it’s easy to read into the song’s bitter lyrics a distaste for his own profession, or rather what it has become: “When it’s pop goes the weasel/Let go of the easel/You don’t want this rickety rackety life.”

Having swung with the sultans and banked money for nothing in a previous showbiz existence, Knopfler cast all of that aside years ago when he left Dire Straits behind. He seems content to spend the rest of his career spinning yarns and playing his guitar with a tasteful restraint that recalls the precise yet low-key work of his hero, Chet Atkins.

That’s all well and good, but his albums actually could use a bit of rickety rackety these days. The songs on Kill To Get Crimson are sharply drawn — most notably “True Love Will Never Fade”, in which a relationship is thought of as an indelible tattoo, and “The Scaffolder’s Wife”, a humorous yet somehow sympathetic ballad about a woman “losing her looks/Over company books.” Knopfler puts his guitar in service to these songs, which is to say that he doesn’t dazzle on it in a way that could snap the album out of its somnambulance. “Punish The Monkey” is a rare exception, but even that is only a midtempo rocker.

Then, too, Knopfler relies rather often on old, wizened narrators. In addition to the artist, there’s the aged pawnbroker of “Heart Full Of Holes”, the boxer who has lost a step recounting “The Secondary Waltz”, and the doddering lothario on the prowl in “Behind With The Rent”. Knopfler seems to be padding the way for his own retreat into geezerdom, which seems premature for a man of his talents.

Still, like much of his post-Dire Straits output, Kill To Get Crimson does reward a listener’s patience. Trouble is, more and more of it is required to get through a Knopfler album these days.