This song really ought to be completely insufferable.
I mean, the worst kind of lead guitarist is the one who noodles aimlessly over the vocal melody, and pretty much every line is followed by a few seconds of electric guitar solo. It's a call-and-response format that usually sounds like nobody actually wants a response, but for some reason it works in "Brothers in Arms," perhaps because Mark Knopfler's a better guitarist than those assholes you went to high school with.
"Brothers in Arms" takes on some really heavy topics, like war and homesickness and abandonment, with grave sincerity. You could trace a philosophical line from "Brothers in Arms" through Going After Cacciato to All Quiet on the Western Front back to the mutinies after the Nivelle Offensive, and I'm sure that'd be fascinating, but that's not what gets me about this song.
It's just so quiet and lonely. People are fond of throwing the word "haunting" around about music, but "Brothers in Arms" genuinely is. The lyrics and melody are incredibly simple, just setting the stage and giving you time to mull them over while the guitar fills in the emotional cues. And yet I find myself singing the melody to myself over and over.
All of that works in such a slow, repetitive, sparsely arranged song because there's actually a lot going on in the background. While the vocals and guitar trade lines, the keyboards and rhythm guitar aren't just pounding out the same chords over and over--at the end of each line there's always motion, either from major to minor and back, or to a suspension, and that allows the loneliness of the arrangement to sink in without feeling like the song's incomplete.
