The Eurythmics of Our Lives: Vol. 2 - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Written: Dec 15 '05 (Updated Dec 26 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A powerful breakthrough album, elegantly remastered and expanded with supercool bonus tracks
Cons: Uneven, but damn near iconic.
The Bottom Line: In which the author's son introduces a new dance sensation.
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| plorentz's Full Review: Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)... [Digipak] - Eur... |
I recently confessed to driving through freezing rain and a brutal wind to get to a record store on the other side of town to spend $130 picking up the eight recently reissued albums by the Eurythmics. But I left an important detail out of that confession. I did this on a day when my son was out of school (parent teacher conferences), and I took him with me. Moreover, when we got to the west side Exclusive Co. (my new-release store of choice), I found that, in fact, they had already sold their copies of the first two Eurythmics albums - In the Garden and their breakthrough 1983 disc Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). So, while awaiting approval on my long-suffering Visa card, I had the clerk call Exclusive's (almost prohibitively geographically inconvenient) downtown location to see if they had the two CDs, and if so, to have them held for me.
15 minutes later, I'm dragging my poor son through that freezing rain and brutal wind six blocks down State Street from the nearest parking ramp to fulfill my most rabid completist impulses, both our faces weatherbeaten, tears forming and flowing down our crimson cheeks, tiny icicles forming in my beard. Am I a bad dad? Was this an act of Crawford-esque cruelty? Would you believe me if I told you that my son himself insisted that we make this awful shopping trek?
It's true.
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Over Halloween weekend, James and Stewart and I took a quick road trip down to Chicago for a couple of days - to see some sights, stay in a hotel, and basically just bum around the city for the stated purpose of creating some good memories of what is probably my own favorite city, for a kid whose previous experience of Chicago had been grim and nightmarish. We spent a morning at Shedd Aquarium, we ate (on two consecutive nights) at a terrific Italian restaurant, and walked the Navy Pier jollifying ourselves with iMax movies, a stained glass museum, and genuine Chicago hot dogs.
Stewart and I spent much of the time - much to James's exasperation - speaking to each other on imaginary Star Wars type walkie-talkies. Driving through Midway Airport at night: [kssh] approaching intergalactic travel hub [kssh]. Navigating a crowded sidewalk: [kssh] Alert! Antheranian brain suckers! We're surrounded! [kssh]. Where James often connects with Stewart on a very nurturing, and even (dare I say) motherly level, my bonding moments with him tend to be more random, and, y'know, weird and creative. While strolling out of Navy Pier exhausted, hand-in-hand-in-hand since Stew seemed compelled to run off ahead of us into the crowd, I started singing along with a song emanating from who knew where. Only to find Stew singing along with me. And panic erupting on James's face like a teenage case of acne.
Sweet dreams are made of this (but we sang "these")
Who am I to disagree
I've traveled the world and the seven seas
Everybody's lookin' for something
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Stewart doesn't know it yet, but there's a copy of the just-released Eurythmics Ultimate Collection in his Christmas stocking. It's actually a selfish gift. Basically, I want him to keep his grubby little paws off my precious new Eurythmics reissues. I want their elegant digipaks to remain pristine. I want their playable sides to remain perfectly fingerprint free. I barely allow myself to touch them. With their upgraded sound, their generous handfuls of not-useless bonus tracks, their beautiful and bountiful photo layouts and design by Laurence Stevens (who did the art direction for all the original albums), their informative liner notes by Phill Savidge - these reissues are audio-visual crack for Eurythmics fans, and by extension, fans of 80s pop.
And my 11-year-old son - who, hearing the legendary synth hook which opens "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" just now is abandoning his homework (umm, hello?)at the kitchen table to come downstairs and do his nifty Eurythmics dance (a combination of "The Robot" and "The Xylophones") and sing along in an unintentionally comical (and frighteningly accurate) approximation of Annie's brilliant phrasing: militant and declarative, each word precise and uncompromised, punctuated, soulful, yet monotone, dangerous and inviting, seductive and predatory. Stew is being the Annie Lennox. My son.
And y'know, it may already be too late to quell his Eurythmics appetite with just the Ultimate Collection. Last Sunday, while we were all cleaning house in preparation for his adoption party, I heard him up in his room singing to himself: Jennifer, in your dress of deepest purrrrr-urple... Uh-oh, he's into the deep tracks now!
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I was no older than Stewart when I got my introduction to the Eurythmics. And like many folks my age, I was taken more by their vision than their sound. It was hard to really hear how infectious that synth line was when here was this gender-ambiguous woman with close-cropped bright orange hair in a take-no-shit business suit ruthlessly wielding a pointer, while flashing images of S&M masked cattle onto a screen inside at the front of what looked to be an epicenter of corporate power. Annie Lennox was the CEO of this strange scene, and the way she gazed into the camera made me feel both excited, and a little stricken - as if I, myself, were one of her underlings, totally, unhealthily loyal but also bound to disappoint (and to be punished - or rather, "abused" - for it).
Strangely (and marvelously) enough though, that vibe transferred quite vividly to the radio too. For instance, Stewart has never seen the video, but judging by his own performances of the song, he gets it. And "it" is not only in Annie's dark, chant-like vocal on the chorus, or her wordless moans and howls over the bridges, but also in the tenacity of that synth hook - which is somehow way too complicated to try to hum, but nevertheless demands immediate and sustained attention. "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This", both song and video, is a classic. Simple as that.
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Love is a stranger in an open car... Stew says, "I don't get it, what does that mean?" Well, think about it, I say, wondering if they don't still do those "stranger danger" special assemblies with the Officer Friendlys in school anymore. Eventually, he gets the image and says, "yeah, that's true." Great image, huh? But it's not so much the image as the bubbly percussion and the percussive "ugh" the punctuates every other measure that get me and Stew smiling. "Love is a Stranger" was the follow-up single to "Sweet Dreams" in 1983, but it opens the album on a note of quiet (but increasingly not so) yearning... or is it temptation... or something else?
Even though the album's massive title track doesn't appear until the second half of the disc, the difference between this album and its predecessor (1981's In the Garden) are immediately apparent - not just in the more coherent sound of the disc, but also in Annie's newly discovered (and how!) three-dimensionality as a vocalist. A song like "Love is a Stranger" might have been a long Kraftwerk drone on an earlier record (see In the Garden's "Never Gonna Cry Again"), but here it moves from cool, officious observation to something quivery - and I want you - and vulnerable - and I want you - and altogether too close - and I want you - to being out of our control - and I want you so! it's! an! obsession! For all intents and purposes, this really is where Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox started being the Eurythmics.
Not everything works, of course. But even the most awkward moments - like a quirky cover of Sam & Dave's "Wrap It Up" (later popularized by The Fabulous Thunderbirds) featuring Scritti Politti's Green on back-up vocals, which veers dangerously close to Flying Lizards type novelty territory - still feel far more realized and solid than many of the better moments on In the Garden (or any of the Tourists' records for that matter).
And when things do work, they command your attention so powerfully they seem to stop your personal clock. "I Could Give You (A Mirror)" boasts a solid beat, and a heavy-duty industrial synth bassline which grows more and more complicated and factory-like as Lennox's voice is layered over and over on top of itself in a perfect expression of frustration: I could give you a mirror, to show you disappointment! At the other end of the spectrum is "Jennifer", a set of repeated, searching questions - Jennifer in your dress of deepest purple, Jennifer, where are you tonight? - over a minimal bassline that gives the song a shivery waiting-up-for-her-in-a-darkened-sitting-room-at-3-a.m. alone-ness. Album closer "This City Never Sleeps" expands on that same sort of minimal groove to paint a more panoramic view of nocturnal desolation. Gorgeous, and, with understated "urban" sound effects, devastatingly vivid.
Like the other CDs in this series of reissues, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) is topped off with a healthy half-dozen bonus tracks including the b-sides to all three of the album's singles (which cumulatively demonstrate the artistic risks Dave and Annie would take to advance their sound) as well as remixes of the title track and "Love is a Stranger" culled from 1991 club-ready reissues of the singles. But perhaps the most interesting (and essential) of these bonus cuts is a sweetly spacey (and previously unreleased) take on Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love".
As a band, the Eurythmics will always be best known and loved for their singles, but Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) demonstrates that the duo had a lot more creative ammunition in their arsenal than they got credit for. They may have been one of the great "visual" bands of the 90's but songs like "Love is a Stranger", "The City Never Sleeps" and "Jennifer" demonstrate that they didn't need a video camera to conjure exciting, colorful and real-as-life presences. It's most certainly a flawed record, and the Eurythmics would improve upon it with their next, but Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) is one of the definitive pop records of the 1980s - and this reissue is the definitive version of it.
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RATINGS:
Original album - 4 stars
Reissue - 5 stars
Total - 4.5 stars rounded up
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" [deluxe edition] by the Eurythmics
RCA / Legacy Records
Originally released 1983
Reissue released 11/15/2005
Produced by Dave Stewart, w/ A. Williams, R. Crash, Giorgio Moroder
Remastered by Ian Cooper
72 min.
SONGS: Love is a Stranger - I've Got an Angel - Wrap It Up - I Could Give You (A Mirror) - The Walk - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) - Jennifer - This is the House - Somebody Told Me - This City Never Sleeps /BONUS: Home is Where the Heart Is - Monkey Monkey - Baby's Gone Blue - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (Hot Remix) - Love is a Stranger (Coldcut Remix) - Satellite of Love
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THE EURYTHMICS OF OUR LIVES:
In the Garden (1981)
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (1983)
Touch (1983)
Be Yourself Tonight (1985)
Revenge (1986)
Savage (1987)
We Too Are One (1989)
Peace (1999)
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Paul Lorentz
Location: The Land of Limburger and Leinenkugel's
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