OTR: The Call - Reconciled

The cover art is a greyscale photo of a baby sitting in a faux leather bag run through a filter so that the varying shade of the picture do not run from white to black, but light lavender to dark purple. What this photograph has to do with the music on the LP, who the kid is or what said kid has grown up to become, I don't know. However, I can tell you that with Reconciled The Call could have probably been the next U2...had U2 not beaten them down off the charts with the one-two punch of The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree.

Released in 1986 and clocking in at 44 seconds shy of 40 minutes, Reconciled was The Call's fourth LP overall. It was also their first for Elektra Records after a contract dispute with Mercury kept them from releasing any new material for two years. They would release two LPs under the Elektra label before moving to MCA in 1989.

One of Peter Gabriel's favourite groups, Gabriel - along with Jim Kerr - provide backing vocals on opening track "Everywhere I Go." It's not a bad opener, but I would have switched the sequence so that it was track two, allowing for the actual track two, "I Still Believe (Great Design)" to be the opening track.

While "Everywhere I Go" is not an inferior song and it certainly caries itself well, the anathematic "I Still Believe" demands to either be an opening or closing track. It's self-contained nature - that is to say that it is a song which needs no other songs to "support" it - damn near demands that it become a "bookend" track. Given the number of albums I've listened to, most records are pretty easy to divide into songs which bridge spaces from one song to another (often mere filler on pop albums, but purposeful in moving a musical narrative if done right) and songs which stand self-contained ("hey boys, we've got a hit single on our hands"). "I Still Believe" was wisely released as a single, despite being over five minutes long. Even so, the song became a college radio hit but couldn't seem to crack the Billboard charts.

A track in its proper place would be the melancholy closer "Even Now."

As a whole, this disc is like an anthem-rock time capsule from the 1980s. Every touchstone of the decade is there: the big drums with heavy reverb on the snare, the seemingly extraneous keyboards, the affected depth on the vocals...I'd be lying if I said I didn't love it. Still, while enjoyable, The Call doesn't hold the same place in my heart as say The Cure or The Church. Perhaps this is because, while I've been aware they existed on some level for years, I never actually bought the album until I needed it for a DJ gig. Nothing prompted me to seek it out, as I'd heard the songs with enough infrequency to find them still enjoyable yet was satisfied with the number of times I'd heard them as I had no need to "possess" the music and control when the playback occurred. Honestly, if I were DJing regularly I'd probably buy a whole lot more records where I feel this way.

It's just funny because I do have the disposable income - especially if I buy used as most of the music I love has been out for over a decade - to get all of those random records I couldn't get growing up. The price of discovery isn't so high anymore. However, when I was a kid, I rarely had any spending money of my own. When I would buy a CD, I would agonise over which one to choose. I'd know songs from the radio, but there I would be, faced with a shiny discs, each with ten-twelve songs, the majority of which I hadn't heard. The local record store didn't have any listening stations so I'd have to take a leap of faith as to which musician would reward me with quality entertainment beyond just the singles for my purchase. I suspect, at least at one point, it was this kind of thinking which may have been partly responsible for the success of the Now That's What I Call Music series.