Eight sprawling tracks of wide-screen Gabrielesque art rock (that's an average of two a year) are wedded to a meticulous production; TFF's Curt Smith and Roland Orzabel are clearly perfectionists – the record is heavily produced, but not to the point that all the life is produced right out of it. Although she appears on only three cuts, Oleta
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Adams informs the entire record with her soulful pipes, adding a human vibrancy barely present in the band's earlier, highly automated music. Heavyweight guests such as drummers Simon Phillips and Manu Katché and avant-garde trumpeter Jon Hassell make strong contributions, and Phil Collins turns in his best drumming in years.
To listen to the album is to enter a world with its own set of symbols, complex but engrossing; The Seeds of Love is almost a concept album, down to the way the phrases "the sun and the moon" and "the wind and the rain" pop up rather cryptically in the first and last songs. The newly soulful Orzabel duets with Adams on the slow-burning opener, "Woman in Chains." The song could simply be a women's-lib anthem, but like everything else about this album, there's another level or two – an unearthing of the "feminine" side of the male psyche and, by extension, an explanation of just why everybody wants to rule the world. The poignant closer, "Famous Last Words," about two lovers' bracing for the Big One, reveals what might happen if the machismo outlined in "Woman in Chains" were to go unchecked.
The first single and the album's centerpiece, "Sowing the Seeds of Love," is a joyous call to activism carried by an over-the-top production that hauls out every last bell and whistle from the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour era. "Feel the pain/Talk about it/If you're a worried man – then shout about it," sings Orzabel, recalling "Shout" and recasting it in a social context. Despite a dalliance with Sixties naiveté, even the hippie-dippiest line, "Every minute of every hour, I love the sunflower," alludes to the Green party, leaving one to wonder whether the song's flower-power sentiments (and sound) are really as dated as they seem. Incidentally, the song is catchy as hell.
Otherwise, hooks are few and far between, yet the songs stick in the listener's head in almost subliminal fashion. Lush and melodic, "Advice for the Young at Heart" comes closest to a conventional pop tune; by contrast, the bleak, harrowing "Standing on the Corner of the Third World" gains its strength from a remarkable collision of sound and idea; the eight-and-a-half-minute "Badman's Song" suggests a stylistic continuum fro
Tears took a great leap forward with this mix of psychedelia, mellow prog, sensitive lite rock and shimmering pop. "Sowing the Seeds of Love," a majestic epic that showcased Tears for Fears' lifelong Beatles fixation, is one of their all-time best, and "AdviceĀ
" sounds like a career highlight for Spandau Ballet. Daring, if overly serious (as much of their '80s work is).
