Indeed, compared to his crystalline elegance and fragile introspection on the first two LPs, the creator of Making Movies now seems as bold, confident and determined to take chances in life, love and rock & roll as the brassy rollerball queen he watches with such fascination in “Skateaway.” On this album, Knopfler is making “movies” - i.e., songs, some of which remind us of films: Carousel, Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Cabaret, et al. “A house of cards/Was never built for shock,” he admits in “Solid Rock,” the snarling, guitar-driven number that best describes what the new record is all about.
On Making Movies, Mark Knopfler pushes back those influences, rolls up his sleeves and knuckles down to the business of cutting a Dire Straits disc that’s far greater than the sum of its parts. Dire Straits and Communiqué were like roll calls of the star’s patron saints, yet all too often Knopfler’s hero worship overshadowed both the richly romantic tapestries of his tunes and the tasty team playing of bassist John Illsley, drummer Pick Withers and now-departed rhythm guitarist David Knopfler. But when he pinned them on the band, they stood out like scarlet letters. On Dire Straits’ first two albums, Knopfler wore his influences proudly on his sleeve. King, Jimi Hendrix’ string-bending sensuality and James Burton’s country-pop sheen. Finally, Knopfler’s guitar style is a shotgun wedding of jazzy chording and harmonic tangents descended from Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery, the no-nonsense electric blues of B.B. He writes such songs as “Sultans of Swing” and “Once upon a Time in the West” with the cinematic flair of Bruce Springsteen, the hall-of-mirrors imagery of classic Dylan and the slashing thrusts of Neil Young’s bayonetlike realism. Cale’s breathy, marbles-in-the-mouth whisper. His voice is a smoky mixture of Bob Dylan’s acidic whine, Tom Waits’ tubercular snore and J.J. Singer, songwriter and ace guitarist Mark Knopfler is the impressive sum of several very appealing parts.
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