First Impressions 1: The Seeds of Love

Tears for Fears (1989)

[First impressions of albums bought in my September 2021 spree]

The cover has not aged
as well as the music

The first album I'm listening to for my first impressions of those I bought during my outing yesterday, and already I'm cheating. I know this album very well. It's a sumptuous, warm bath of a record, a miracle of late-eighties record production that I have enjoyed for decades and find myself returning to again and again.

This is the 2020 remaster, so, given that I know it well, I have to restrict my first impressions to what differences I can hear. I'd say it's mixed slightly louder, which is a little surprising given that the loudness wars are over, but thankfully, on an album so full of dynamics, there's no evidence of these being sacrificed. The songs are full of little touches that are sounding clearer, I think. There's power and weight in the bass at the beginning of "Woman in Chains", followed by a surrounding cloud of ambience as the track gets going. "Badman's Song" ebbs and flows through its mood changes as gloriously as ever, and I am reminded again what a good singer Roland Orzabal is.

I didn't really need to do a first impressions of this album, of course, but I having somehow failed to buy this before now, I wanted to hear it properly through my system at home. It sounds great.