The Seeds Of Love
Rolling Stone: November 2, 1989
by Michael Azerrad
©1989 Rolling Stone

After the release of Tears For Fears' mammoth – selling second album, Songs From the Big Chair, in 1985, an English music paper remarked, "It'll soon be respectable to like Tears for Fears." Sure enough, the band has returned with a mature, musically sophisticated album that's bound to impress even the most doubting of Thomases.

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 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 from Little Feat to Weather Report.

"Sowing the Seeds of Love" contains the album's raison d'être: "High time we made a stand and shook up the views of the common man." The songs constantly draw parallels between the personal and the political, and it's exciting that such thought-provoking music will undoubtedly be so widely heard. If with the title track Tears for Fears beg comparison to the Beatles, it's in the unspoken assertion that popular music can also be outstanding music. That's something this remarkable record proves over and over again.

Review Grade: 4 / 5 stars