• AllMyVinyl #136
• Band: A-Ha
• Album Title: Hunting High & Low
• Release Date: 1 Jun 1985
• Date purchased: Unknown
• Location purchased: Likely Record Cellar in Philadelphia
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

“But I’ll be stumblin’ away
Slowly learnin’ that life is okay”

If you’ve spent any time with my vinyl series, you’ll notice that the majority of my choices are either metal or rock.  80’s pop is not usually on my radar, but here we are.  Today I’m spinning “Hunting High & Low” by the Norwegian pop band “A-ha”.  This band has some output over the years.  They have a total of eleven studio albums from the first in 1985 to the most recent in 2022.  A quick count shows that to have in the neighborhood of 125 studio tracks.   But I’d wager that the overwhelming majority of people (especially those of us in the United States) know them for “Take on Me”, and you can’t name very many others – if any.  There’s actually only one other A-ha song I can mention besides Take on Me, and that’s their James Bond theme they did in 1987 – “The Living Daylights”.

So as I sit down to listen to this album today and write about it, I have to admit to a bit of trepidation. I can recite lyrics for Take on Me, but nothing – and I mean literally zero else on this album is anything else I know.  Perhaps when I listen to it, it might jog a memory, but I’m going into this one with a total blank slate.  Also, I’m doing something different here, I’m not breaking down every single track here.  I’ll have my intro which will talk a little about the album, and then I’ll probably only mention a handful of songs when the moment strikes – because I’ll probably say the same for a lot of ’em – “Yeah, don’t know this, song doesn’t do anything for me”.

When I got the boxes with my vinyl archive from my mom’s basement, this album was in there, and to be completely transparent, I had 100% forgotten I owned this.  When I saw it in the box, I thought “Why?” – after thinking about it a bit, I’ve come to the conclusion this is one of those albums I bought for a single song.  “Take on Me” was a monster hit back in 85, and back then you couldn’t go to iTunes and buy a single song if you wanted it.  You had to buy the whole thing, so that’s what I did.  Given it wasn’t a band I was interested in everything over, I have a vague recollection of buying it from a place I used to frequent back then called ‘Record Cellar” a store run by a guy I used to go to High School with back in the day.  It’s for that reason that the rest of the album is a blank slate to me.

Take On Me – Well, the most well known song – and the first single – was the first song on the album.  Back in the 80’s, this was a pretty common thing to do.  This is a super catchy song, and was on every massive rotation list MTV had back in the day.  If you paid any attention to music videos in 1985, then yo saw this.  Probably a dozen times or more.  In three hours.  It got a LOT of attention.  For the first single from a band coming out of the gate – this was f’in white hot.   It’s any bands’ wet dream – to have that kind of monster hit under your belt right from the start will open all kinds of doors for you.  Probably also a curse, because to casuals, nothing will ever compare.  I’m sure there’s a lot of A-Ha hardcores that are bored by it – probably in the way Black Sabbath fans are bored with Paranoid, or Deep Purple fans are with Smoke on the Water – that kind of thing.  As I said above they have a lot of tunes, but this by far is their most well known.

It’s for good reason it’s well known, the song is catchy as hell.  I’ll get to the video in a minute, but even without the video, it’s a really catchy tune.  It’s one of those tracks that I find myself playing more than once when I do hear it.  The keyboard riff that runs through it dominates the track much in the way the keyboard riff permeates the Dio song “Rainbow in the Dark”.  It’s really odd, as I shouldn’t like this song – because the toolbox their musical landscape is constructed from is a sandbox I don’t like playing in.  But this song is a bloody ear worm.  I find it hard to not sing along, or want to repeat it, or something.  Between the song itself or the video, I’ve probably listened to this a bloody bazillion times.  For a Norwegian pop band, that’s an accomplishment for this metal head.

Speaking of the video and number of plays…  The video for Take on Me has been played over 2.1 billion times on Youtube as of the writing of this article.  It’s for good reason – the video is quite good.  It’s a rotoscoped combination of animation and live action melded together.  It’s 40 years old now, and it STILL works well as a video concept.  In 1985, it was f’in groundbreaking – there was nothing like it, and got EVERYONE’S attention.  That it’s coupled with a total ear worm moved it into to the general zeitgeist of popular culture – far beyond the kind of attention a single song usually gets.  It’s been parodied and used in many places and TV episodes from things like Family Guy to Doctor Who. Doctor Who the show didn’t do it, but a fan produced a video which showed the various incarnations of the title role interacting in the rotoscoped world of “Take on Me”.

A-Ha a couple of years ago produced a three part series about the making of this video, you can view those on Youtube here, it’s well worth watching if you’re into making of stuff.

Finally, the version of the song that’s known in this video and on the album actually is the second version of the song. They originally released Take on Me as a single in 1984 with a completely different mix of the song and totally different music video (shows them on a blue screen).  It’s not like it’s a totally different song, but it does sound a bit more primitive than the more well known album/video version.  I’ve embedded that song below.

From here I move into a pile of songs that I know nothing about, and is the part I expected to know either nothing, close to it, and probably have far FAR less to say.  I had intended to only write about one or two of them, but I ended up saying SOMETHING about all of them, but not much in most of the cases.

Train of Thought – Was the third single from the album, had a video produced, but I can’t recall ever seeing it before.  Song actually sounds like something I think I’ve heard in a soundtrack from something in the era like Beverly Hills Cop.   The music video revisits Take on Me stylistically.  From a “plot” standpoint it’s got nothing to do with it, but visually there’s osmose of the same kind of rotoscoping.   Song does nothing for me.

Hunting High & Low – The title track was the fourth single from the album.  Had a music video.  Didn’t chart in the US at all.  No.  This goes beyond “song does nothing for me” – don’t like this period.

The Blue Sky – It’s 2:36, so at least it’s over quickly.

Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale – The intro to this song didn’t sound too bad to e, but then the verse started and the song is dancing in the territory of boring 80’s ballad.  Musically this didn’t bother me too much, but the vocals were a snoozer.   Yeah, this was “over” for me

The Sun Always Shines on TV – This one has the most interest to those of Take on Me, because the storyline of the Take on Me video is continued in the video for this one. The video is different, though – if you were expecting more rotoscoped action in the girl’s bedroom, that’s not where this goes.  The part of the video that is tied to earlier one is over right at the start (even including a “The End” caption).  The bulk of this video is the band playing their instruments in what looks like a church – something weird with mannequins being who the band is playing to.  Musically, this is actually the most interesting track on the album outside of Take on Me.  It’s got some guitar sounds which I think work well plus some nice orchestration – it’s a shame they didn’t lean into that more. That 80’s sound they’re known for is here for sure, but I don’t mind this track at all.

And You Tell Me – Another really short one (at 1:53).  It’s a slower track, not actively bad, just kind of “there”.  Not quite sure what to say about it other than that.

Love is Reason – This has a poppy keyboard sound that stylistically matches what they were doing with Take on Me, but it’s not nearly as catchy as THAT.  The pace is faster, which makes it a bit more interesting, as their slow stuff is a total snoozer.  This is fair.  Not super great, but I didn’t hate it.

I Dream Myself Alive – Yeah, OK, this song happened.

Here I Stand and Face the Rain – And this one.  Hoping maybe the album would end on something more upbeat or at least closer to the style of music I like. Nope, the album had an ending as disappointing as the majority of the album.

The Living Daylights – While this song is not on this album, I wanted to say a few words, as I’m never gonna write about A-Ha again after this entry.  This is the only other song I know, it’s their title track to the James Bond movie of the same name from 1987.  This is musically more in line with “Take on Me” than anything else on the album.  While it does have some of the vocal gymnastics A-ha is known for, it also doesn’t sound a ton like their classic sound, but you can tell it’s them.  That’s probably a lot to do with the fact that a lot of Bond themes are co-written with someone connected with the Bond movies.  If you’ve never heard this song, you can check it out here.   I also wrote about it a bit more in an article I did where I ranked all the James Bond themes from Dr No through No Time to Die. You can read that here.

To sum this up, it’s what I expected.  I did actually listen to the entire album as tempting it was to just listen to “Take on Me”, and say “the rest of the album sucked”.  I legit tried.  Found one other song on here I really liked, and a whole lot of stuff I didn’t know, and probably may never listen to again in my life.   In fact, I couldn’t even make it through the whole album in one continuous sitting.  Halfway through I had to listen to something else and put on a track by Judas Priest called Jugulator – a live version their former singer did in Lima Peru on 28 May 2025..  Had to break up the synth pop so my ears functioned correctly again.

I must be “wrong” about this album, as it’s still in print on vinyl in 2025.  Only reason for that is that there’s a bunch of people buying it.  Not sure WHY, though.