Simple Minds
New Gold Dream

THE REVIEW

An album composed and played in a state of grace. One of the few albums that identify with an era, a sound, a well-defined mood. Sunny, sparkling, cutting. Translated, albeit rhetorically, into effective images in the video for "Glittering Prize," in which everything (from the backgrounds, to the instruments, to the musicians' faces) is "golden." And not for nothing, on the back of the cover, there reads "made in Summer 82", precisely to identify it with a particular season.

A producer, Peter Walsh, who seeks, even directly manipulating the mixer, to "sculpt" the sound, until then indebted to certain a-la Kraftwerk styles, and make it more open, more pronounced. A finally wise use of electronics (Mike McNeill has never been so in command of his synthesizers), a nod to 4/4 rhythms (the opening of the title track, "New Gold Dream," is emblematic in this sense...), a Charles Burchill who weaves good order, breaking away from the cliché of the "rock guitarist," and often replacing the phrases woven by the keyboards.
Another element of undeniable value is the bass patterns created by a never-so-creative Derek Forbes (definitely a disciple of bass schools like Percy Jones and the contemporary Mick Karn... surely one of the most underrated bassists on the entire rock planet): together with McNeill's Prophet 5, the bass parts are some of the most memorable recorded on this album.
The voice of that old trickster Kerr is deliberately left almost in the background, or surely at the level of the other instruments: heavily effected, gloomy and menacing, evocative. A small example of how to make good use of not-exceptional vocal qualities.

The rest? A bunch of good and "classic" songs, no longer labelable as "new wave" or electro-pop, but true timeless classics.
Dazzling the singability of "Promised you a miracle", despite a very strange compositional structure; the swaying groove of "Big Sleep" (that is, how to play slap bass and not play in a funky band...); the disco-style beat box that is overwhelmed by a flood of keyboards in the title track "New Gold Dream", and the progression that turns the song into a veritable "anthem" (I remember a bootleg where the same song was sung arm in arm with... lo and behold, the usual Bono Vox!).

I repeat, an album in a state of grace, where four musicians in full creative maturity meet, in a hot summer of '82, in a recording studio, assisted by an attentive producer, and bring out a masterpiece full of... sparkling gems.