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Formats and Editions
1. In Trance as Mission
2. Sweat in Bullet
3. 70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall
4. Boys from Brazil
5. Love Song
6. This Earth That You Walk Upon
7. Sons and Fascination
8. Seeing Out the Angel
9. Theme for Great Cities
10. American, The
11. 20th Century Promised Land
12. Wonderful in Young Life
13. League of Nations
14. Careful in Career
15. Sound in 70 Cities
More Info:
For their fourth album in three years, Simple Minds signed on with Virgin and enlisted Gong's Steve Hillage as producer. The sessions continued the group's impressive run of high-quality output. Though their work with Hillage hardly spawned anything on a plane with the two albums that preceded it and the one that followed it, it's still a substantial piece of the Simple Minds puzzle. Bridging the art disco of Empires and Dance with the pop masterpiece New Gold Dream, the album falters when the band seems to be reaching a bit too far for their own good. The record isn't without moments of brilliance, like the exquisitely detailed "70 Cities As Love Brings the Fall" (a great balance between grand melodies and bizarre noise), the insistently snaking "In Trance As Mission," and "Sweat in Bullet," which has sparkling keyboard parts and crafty guitar interplay. Aside from these moments, the mind tends to wander and wonder if the band was trying to do too much. Upon it's release, Sons and Fascination was issued for a limited time with a bonus LP, the scattered Sister Feelings Call, which includes a great pre-Sons and Fascination A-side ("The American"). When Virgin re-issued Sons and Fascination in 2003, the complete Sister Feelings Call was tacked to the end.Reviews:
''Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call'' is the current common title (see the 2002/03 CD re-issue) for what were once two technically separate releases by Simple Minds, both assembled from the same sessions and released at the same time and, in some instances, sold as a double-LP set. Since the current CD version contains all the tracks once split onto two LPs, with their respective track running orders preserved, ''Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call'' may be considered a single album with a near 80-minute running length, ie the band's fourth studio album.
Viewed as vinyl LPs, ''Sons and Fascination'' is the fourth Simple Minds album, released in 1981, with ''Sister Feelings Call'' the fifth. The two were released simultaneously, ''Sons and Fascination'' being the main feature, and ''Sister Feelings Call'' included as a bonus disc with the first 10,000 copies of the original release. The apparent reason for having two single LPs was Virgin Records' reluctance to release all the material as a double LP. As a result, ''Sons And Fascination'' came out as the somewhat more coherent album, leaving ''Sister Feelings Call'' with tracks that were rejected for the main feature. Despite this policy, ''Sister Feelings Call'' may be viewed as a fully-fledged album or at least as the second disc in a double set.
Upon its first CD release in mid-1980s ''Sons and Fascination'' came with tracks from ''Sister Feelings Call'' added directly after the main set, so that the CD played as a single long album. Due to technical limitations, the disc's running length having to fit within 74 minutes, two tracks from ''Sister Feelings Call'', "League of Nations" and "Sound in 70 Cities" (an instrumental version of ''Sons and Fascinations "70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall") were dropped. However they appeared on the CD single of the 12-inch cut of "The American" and would re-appear in album form in 2002 and 2003 when remasters of the double set were issued under the title ''Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call''.
These albums were the first recordings the band made for Virgin Records (having ended their contract with Arista) and their first with producer Steve Hillage, who was a guitarist in the hippy progressive rock band Gong. One thing Hillage and Simple Minds had in common was a love of krautrock music. - Wikipedia
