Customer Rating:  
Summary: extraordinare
Comment: music takes you back to your high school years in the 80's. Buy it, highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Let there be light.
Comment: Casual fans may think Simple Minds has gone the way of the Brat Pack but not so fast. This seminal band is still together, reinventing itself at least once a decade. This year (2008) being the 30th anniversary of the group's creation, 2002's "The Best of Simple Minds" is a good way to review accomplishments and get jazzed for future releases.
Disc 1 is sure to activate memories of those who went to college in the 1980s (as I did). Yet maturity gives greater weight to the songs. Years pass and meanings broaden.
You 40-somethings recalling your crushes on Ally Sheedy (I'm still in the throes of mine) and Emilio Estevez might happen to notice Simple Minds' habitual references to activating light in "Don't You (Forget About Me)," "Alive and Kicking," "Glittering Prize," and "See The Lights." This concept comes to us through band's religious veins, carrying the blood of life/light to the heart (that same heart wears a royal crown and adorns the cover of our CD as well as 1987's "Live in The City of Light.").
Jim Kerr, lead vocalist and prodigious songwriter of Simple Minds, knows his Genesis (not just his friend Peter Gabriel's band Genesis but the Genesis of the Bible) - G-d created light first and that necessarily precedes everything we do.
"Sanctify Yourself" talks of activating love (which is really the same thing as light). "Let There Be Love" goes after the same idea. Displaying the band's endearing edginess, "Sanctify Yourself" jumps into the minefield of social action, or applied religion, ending with a prayer for proper guidance with Christian overtones.
"You can't stop the world for a boy or a girl
Sweet victims of poor circumstances
But you can pour back the love, sweeping down from above
Giving hope and making more chances
Well, I hope and I pray that maybe someday
You'll come back down here and show me the way."
The song's title supplies the added profundity that the only person you can change directly is yourself. All great social movements start with the heart of the individual.
"Alive and Kicking" counsels persistence whether in relations with G-d or a fellow human, leading to renewal of affections.
"Who's got the touch to calm the storm inside?
Don't say goodbye
Don't say goodbye
In the final seconds who's gonna save you?
Oh, alive and kicking
Stay until your love is, love is, alive and kicking."
"Don't You (Forget About Me)," thanks to "The Breakfast Club" movie, is Simple Minds' best known song (even corporate radio plays this one) yet it was not written by Kerr or Charlie Burchill. But it sure could have been. Keith Forsey combined water with the oft-used light imagery used by Kerr. The rain of "Don't You" ought to remind of Moses prayer/prediction (Deuteronomy 32:2) that his teaching would fall like rain, giving hope that the best moral teachings continue to erode our hearts of stone even it appears that world remains mostly a loveless place.
"Will you stand above me?
Look my way, never love me
Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling
Down, down, down."
Disc 2 is a bit more direct in that it features songs dealing with contemporary political/human rights issues. "Mandela Day," "Biko," and "Belfast Child" evoke powerful feelings.
Yet Simple Minds is at its best through indirect angst. Borrowing liberally from traditional religion, the band adds bits from musical heroes and contemporaries. Throughout the 32 songs of "The Best of Simple Minds" sharp ears will pick up echoes of Lou Reed, David Bowie, U2, and Bruce Springsteen (Kerr wrote that Springsteen's "Born to Run" is the greatest rock song ever).
In that same 2008 piece (see www.simpleminds.com Web site), Scotland native Kerr wrote that he feels very much like an American thanks to his marriage, child, work, and lifestyle. His sensibility can be likened to that of the American-turned-British poet T.S. Eliot. Eliot once wrote "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." That confident statement of faith can be spotted in the title of Simple Minds' official biography - "The Race is the Prize."
That sentiment pulses through this CD, showing even after three decades the music of Simple Minds is alive and kicking. Old and new fans will pump loving fists (a la Judd Nelson at the end of "The Breakfast Club") in the air in solidarity.
Customer Rating:
Summary: could have left off the second disc
Comment: i think they could have just left off the whole second disc and put New Gold Dream in its entirety instead. Hearing their early stuff, I have refreshed my respect for them: really wonderful, and unique. Hearing their later stuff, bleh, saccharine confirmative smarm that tugs the heartstrings like some dog humping your leg. And that stupid throwaway dance remix at the end adds nothing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Review of Simple Minds CD
Comment: The CD arrived at the expected time snd was packaged in such a way to avoid any damage to the CD. The CD plays well and it is enjoyable to listen to the music from the group.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Totally 80s
Comment: It's the 80s, and I love the 80s! Not much more to say than that!
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