Amazon.co.uk Review
Hunting High & Low, A-ha's first and biggest selling album, contains four UK top ten hits, including "Take On Me" and "The Sun Always Shines On TV", their only number one hit, which sold 500,000 copies in the UK alone. Arguably the last in a generation of instrument playing and songwriting teen bands, A-ha--like
Wham! and
Duran Duran--were always far better than they were given credit for, although their lack of enduring crossover success has meant that, unlike, say,
George Michael, there has been no widespread re-appraisal of their work. This is unfortunate, because
Hunting High & Low is a great album: most definitely not four singles and a bunch of fillers. "Here I Stand And Face The Rain" and "And You Tell Me" in particular are at least as good as the hits. If you liked the singles but had never investigated any further,
Hunting High & Low--like the rest of the band's back catalogue--is an undiscovered and underrated gem.
--Ronita Dutta
Description
The first album by the Norwegian trio of singer Morten Harket, songwriter Pal Waaktaar and keyboardist Mags will forever be known as the album that contains the intoxicating "TakeOn Me", one of the most famous and enduring "one-hit wonders" of the '80s. However, HUNTING HIGH AND LOW actually contains a second US Top 40 hit, "The Sun Always Shines On TV". In addition, even after those songs ceased to receive airplay, A-Ha continued a long and successful career in Europe and elsewhere.
Besides the two singles, the album contains the haunting title track, "Living A Boy's Adventure Tale", which comes across as a keyboard-heavy Scandinavian version of early U2, and the quirky "The Blue Sky", an arresting showcase for Harket's piercing falsetto. HUNTING HIGH AND LOW shows that there's much more to A-Ha than their memory in commonpop history suggests.
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