After the success of Making Movies, Dire Straits had earned the leeway to experiment on their next album, and experiment they did.

Love Over Gold (1982) contains only five songs, each clocking in at or over six minutes. Opening track ‘Telegraph Road’ runs 14 minutes. All that extra runtime is devoted to lengthy instrumental passages featuring Mark Knopfler’s guitar as well as keyboards by new band member Alan Clark.

I’m as big a fan of Knopfler’s guitar work as anyone, but these songs try my patience as anything other than background music. Making Movies had some epics, but they went to interesting places lyrically and structurally. The songs here mostly just sit in place.

First single ‘Private Investigations,’ a sultry spoken-word slice of musical film noir, didn’t chart in the U.S. but made it all the way to #2 in the UK, becoming their most popular release in the region.

Second single ‘Industrial Disease’ is something else entirely, a jaunty jam that feels out of place on this album. It sounds a lot like an early rough draft of ‘Walk of Life,’ which would arrive in a couple of years.

At this point, Dire Straits was on enough of a roll that even an artsy experiment like this ended up selling well and winning over critics. But the band’s commercial and critical peak was still to come.