Sing – Less by Michele Benetello

To make some undestructible pop it takes the painstaking patience of a craftsman, as that often difficult material has never been forged in large assembly lines, although the Brill Bulding and the Motown forge existed to refute the axiom.

You must be a Benvenuto Cellini of the seven notes to produce a song that has the prerequisites of the masterpiece, because the world does not have much of Good Vibrations, and perhaps for this reason it is not a good place to live in. It is necessary to file, smooth, and infinitely refine an ever-satisfied pentagram.

As never satiated were Orzabal and Smith even at the time of that homonymous album in which the bomb in question shone. They were precise and inspired enough to represent a zenith, a summit from which a special slalom of sufferings and lewd pathos will descend to lead them towards a rapid dissolution.

There was nothing beyond the Pillars of Hercules of a track so superbly ambitious, ready to lick the backs of that I am The Walrus by you-know-who. There could not be anything anymore, there could not be Talk Talk’s gap (no Laughing Stock on the horizon for the two, quite the contrary) nor the autistic withdrawal of the XTC.

Yet Sowing The Seeds Of Love manages to be dogma, triune song in which vocal harmonies that – in some poor talent’s songbook – would fill a whole side of the record, here make a single in a simply extraordinary jigsaw.

A song that contains three songs (Battisti in Pensieri e Parole was able to get to two), as if they were some harmonic matrioskas ready to overlap in an infinite spiral where, from time to time, emerge (precisely!) Beatles and XTC. Five minutes and thirty-one seconds (six and nineteen in the version on the album) of dreamy and sugary psychedelia explained to the masses which will climb up to number 2 of the American charts and to 5 of the English ones.