138. The Police - Outlandos d'Amour

I see you've sent my letters back
And my LP records and they're all scratched

This album spoke to me. From the moment I heard that line and remembered when Bobby gave me my albums back and yea, they were scratched, I knew the Police knew me. So, I never fell in love with a hooker and I wasn't born in the 50's and maybe I kept saying "Bologna" instead of "So Lonely," but this was the band for me.

Really, no one else was making music like this. This was, in my little piece of suburbia a time of hard rock (Van Halen) and a time of punk (The Ramones). What were the Police? Were they a little of both? Next to You, So Lonely and Peanuts had punk stylings, but there was something more to them, something broader than punk and deeper than rock. It was music. It was the arrangements of the songs that set them apart from whatever we were listening to at the time. The drumming was richer, the rythmns jazzier, the whole sound fuller.

This was and always will be my favorite Police album. I can put this on and still think of Sting as a cool, punky kind of rocker dude instead of the self-important schmaltz factory he began. Plus, there's Roxanne, which is the song we use in our family to torture my sister, whose husband's first wife was named Roxanne. Thanks, Sting.

Favorite song: Peanuts
Police wiki

47. The Police - Synchronicity

This whole album defines the summer of 1983 for me. Everyone I knew was listening to it. The punks, the metalheads, the disco geeks - even my mother was in love with it. It was at times beautiful and at times dark and ugly. But the entire album from the funky Oh My God to the darkly melodic Tea in the Sahara - even the songs a lot of people write off like Miss Gradenko and Mother - were perfect musical specimens, showing off the talent of each individual band member and bringing everything together - music, lyrics, stories, emotion - in what I always described as a masterpiece (the overplayed and misunderstood Every Breath You Take notwithstanding). For me, the pinnacle of the album came on Synchronicity II, a tale of the darkness that looms under the surface in the life of a suburban family; how all the little things become big things when lived day to day, every single day of your entire life and sometimes it's enough to turn you into a monster that slowly creeps toward madness (my take, anyhow).

I really wish Sting didn't go off and fall in love with himself after this album. Then again, the band put out five near-perfect albums. Maybe they knew enough to quit while they were ahead.

Favorite song: Synchronicity II
Rolling Stone review from 1983