Elegant, casual and a bit boring

As "old" Dire Straits- and Mark Knopfler fan is its new album a must for me. Hardly he is so much in recent years returned to his roots as with this CD. Country tones, how she heard more and more on the last albums, hardly can be found here, only now and then breathed into the steel guitar in between. Controlling influence is more of Blues and one might well pre telen that "Shangri-La" was recorded shortly before or after the very first Dire Straits LP. - And yet again! Because Knopfler's latest work lacks the "Punch", it simply lacks such a "cracker" as "Sultans of Swing", "Down to the Waterline" or "Lady Writer; not to mention pop gems like" Romeo and Juliet ".
The new CD sounds undoubtedly wonderfully relaxed and elegant, never want to be doubted that here great musical skill are at work, but you never feel that these rounder want their listeners and fans to convince of something that they apparently no longer necessary; and so the album simply lacks a little of the "fighting spirit". Knopfler is this quite frankly in an interview in the current Rolling Stone to: He must make no more plates, but he can and he can. As much as you want to envy him because of this laid-back philosophy of life and they also begrudge him so much but he should us again a few treat "real" songs. On the new CD with songs are "5.15 am" and "Boom, Like That" rudimentary here that offer a glimpse its great songwriter Art, but often - too often - he likes in the meantime in innocuous or indulges in the typical English humor. Song titles like "Whoop de doo" underline that. A little more may do the trick!
At the end: 3 stars, but they are mainly the large musical perfection, to which there is no denying, owed.