7/29/2023 0 Comments Super space funeral 4 deluxe![]() ![]() ![]() Although the organ line perilously evokes Steve Winwood, Adams and Orzabal duet with such congruity that the discrete parts meld. The album tracks don’t proffer such immediate pleasures the band must have agreed, for the set includes no less than five versions of “Badman’s Song,” a boogie track fussy and ungainly in its original form but crisp in the so-called Townhouse jam sessions in which Tears for Fears rehearsed the material. The creamy, assured “ Advice for the Young at Heart” boasts Smith’s only lead vocal his falsetto suits what is in essence Tears for Fears’ sophisti-pop track, in which bongos and Nicky Holland’s piano add the lightest of jazz colorings. Earlier, as Adams takes over for the second verse, her plummy contralto hovers in its own space, somewhere between Palladino’s discreet plucks, Collins’ superhumanly steady rimshots, and an eerie sampled flute from Orzabal’s Fairlight unlike the title character, who “calls her man the great white hope,” she’s asserted herself. It also plays like a gospel song interrogating itself, notably when the full band joins them for a “Hey, Jude” singalong finale whose prayer (“So free her!”) forgets God and looks Man straight in the eye. Neither Talk Talk nor Peter Gabriel could have come up with “Woman in Chains,” impressive in the specificity (and prescience) with which Orzabal examines his masculinity. Skip the radio mixes of “ Woman in Chains,” and “Advice for the Young at Heart” luxuriate in the longer album versions, on which Orzabal, Smith (on occasion), and their players make silence as loud as six guitar solos. The other singles are better, if that’s possible. ![]() It still sounds fabulous-the next chapter in Songs From the Big Chair’s “ The Working Hour.” Several sections grafted together, stitches showing, unfurl in Orzabal and Smith’s Beatles revue: trumpet solos, the lilting callback to “I Am the Walrus,” the love-power ridiculousness of the thing. The allusive, Thatcher-baiting “Sowing the Seeds of Love” (“Kick out the style, bring back the Jam,” indeed) still thunders like the most tuneful of anomalies. The Seeds of Love marks the culmination of the neo-psychedelic soul hybrid that Orzabal had not stopped Rubik’s Cubing well into the summer of 1989. The Seeds of Love remains a not-great album, but Orzabal finding the Little Feat in Songs from the Big Chair’s bombast has a seductive pull. UMe’s fulsome box set, packed with jam sessions, discarded mixes, okay B-sides, and a remaster of the original, hopes to find a new one. But The Seeds of Love had trouble keeping its audience. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, and, for the sake of Fontana/Mercury’s promo department, it better have. “ Sowing the Seeds of Love” peaked at No. Released in 1989 to cautious reviews, The Seeds of Love dropped at a time when formerly obscure acts like The Cure and Depeche Mode were earning Top 10 singles. By this time even Phil Collins and fretless bass wonder Pino Palladino had been enlisted alongside Adams. What became The Seeds of Love resulted from hundreds of hours of peripatetic experimentation, and, when the sessions stretched almost four years, probably just seemed pathetic to their dismayed label. ![]()
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