The Alarm - Strength

You ever sit and wonder what were you thinking as a kid? Maybe not even as a kid, but as a young adult who thought they knew shit, but it turns out they knew shit? Case in point: The Alarm's 1985 release Strength.

It's no secret that I am drawn to shiny things. I'm often a musical crow who looks for the object that stands out and then ignore everything else around it. I bought a lot of records and later CDs for one track. Sometimes I'd get more than I bargained for, generally though I was buying so much stuff that I seldom took the time to really let an album percolate. Not always, but often enough that my memory pertaining to a lot of great stuff is full of blanks. The Alarm suffered from this fate not once, but twice. The first time was when I heard "Strength" for the first time, and my little brain (yes, little - I have a big head but I'm not efficiently using all that extra space) melted. I bought the album, and I don't know what I was expecting, or how I came to the almost immediate conclusion the rest of the album sucked. I had passed judgment and that was it. Still, that one song was so good it made me a fan of the band, although it would be a few years between albums for me. I heard a couple of songs from Change in '89 that got me to buy the CD. Of course the same snap assessment I rendered to Strength I applied to Change and that was more or less the end of the line as far as me as keeping up with The Alarm. I did pick up Standards many year later and thought to myself, "Dang there are a lot of cool songs here how'd I miss these?" I didn't rush out and buy anything else, but it was at least a small move to reassessing some long held bias.

I had lost my vinyl copy of Strength many, many years ago and oddly, it was on my list to find - mainly on the (don't hate me for this) strength of "Strength" but I did know there was more going on than I remembered. Strangely enough the album I would find on vinyl was Sigma from 2019. I listened to that one for a while and then as I was nesting my thoughts to write about the record I found a decent copy of Strength and figured, first things first.

Right off the bat from the opening salvo that launches "Knife Edge" it was fairly evident my younger self didn't know shit. By the time the first side closed out with the band's seven minute opus "Spirit of '76" I was actually sort of gobsmacked. The second side is full of a half dozen songs that cover a lot of musical ground. The songs are all centred on Mike's vocals, but musically the songs are not all stamped from the same basic format which to me is awesome. They're all a little different, but they sound like themselves.

The songs were written by Mike Peters and bassist Eddie Macdonald, except for "Strength" which was a band effort. Speaking of "Strength" it is still the defining song here for me but for slightly different reasons now. The song serves as the linchpin that holds everything together. David Sharp the band's guitarist is as adept at conjuring an ethereal mood as he is at laying down blistering parts that are a wonderful counterpoint to Mike's soaring vocals. Nigel Twist lays down the groove and he and Eddie are locked in tight throughout. Producer Mike Howlett pulled together a wonderful album.

This was incredible stuff. Even back then this should have resonated. I can't quite work out what I might have been thinking. Perhaps it was the shadow of U2, but honestly that just feels like a cop out.  Besides I liked U2/ Occasionally there may have been a sonic bobblybit here and there that evoked some comparison (rightly so), but seriously there were a lot of bands working this particular musical field in the mid '80s. Yes, Mike and Bono both share big, powerful and emotionally evocative voices but for me that's as far as the similarities go.

I had been following Mike's social media posts for the last couple of years, and I knew he was going through another bout of cancer, but things seemed to be so optimistic and Mike so full, literally full of life that it never crossed my mind he wouldn't beat it again and live to tell the tail and sing about it too. Then he was gone. He's been gone a little over a year now. I don't normally get to bent out of shape or emotional over people I've never met, but Mike's passing felt surreal.

Rediscovering Strength has been a lot of fun for me, and at times a little melancholy. Knowing the band would come close to breaking wide open but never quite getting there makes listening to albums like this a little harder. This was so good, and still is so good.

The Alarm was so good. The original line up would release five albums between 1984 and 1991 they established a loyal base and that base never lost faith.