Sonntag, 28. November 2021

Tears for Fears - The Tipping Point (Single): A Review

Has it really been seventeen years? Yes and no. To the greater public, Tears for Fears have been awfully quiet for a long period of time. After Curt Smith left the group in the early 1990s, Roland Orzabal soldiered on with guitarist Alan Griffiths and released two rather overlooked albums, Elemental in 1993 and the brilliant Raoul and the Kings of Spain in 1995. After the 1996 tour, Orzabal retired the name, having grown disillusioned by audiences who were only there for the early material and didn't care as much for his more mature work. In 2001, he released his one and (to date) only solo album, Tomcats Screaming Outside. By this point, he and Curt Smith (who was now living in the USA) had already reconnected and started making music with Smith's new writing partner, guitarist Charlton Pettus. In 2004 (2005 in some countries), the reunion album Everybody Loves a Happy Ending was released. Plagued with a fractured release strategy and a bad mastering job on the European edition, the album didn't achieve the expected success (although it has continued to sell well). A somewhat unsatisfying live album (due to its shortened festival setlist and the band not playing their best gig), Secret World - Live in Paris, was released in 2006, including a new studio recording, the exuberant "Floating Down the River". This song was also included on the Universal double CD compilation Gold, which had originally been planned as a career-spanning box set.



The band played a handful of gigs in the following years but otherwise seemed semi-retired. Curt Smith remained more active, releasing two solo albums - Halfway, Pleased and Deceptively Heavy - plus collaborating with lesser known artists on various projects. All of these were released with zero fanfare, many of them download-only or on small labels. In 2010, Smith complained that labels weren't interested in new Tears for Fears music. Despite this, 2010 was one of their most active years regarding live shows, as the band played the US, Australia and Southeast Asia. The gig in the Philippines in particular will stick in the band's memories for the crowd's sheer enthusiasm.



Things picked up in 2013, when Universal decided to give the band's debut, 1983's The Hurting, the deluxe edition and box set treatment. The release was curated by reissue specialist Steve Hammonds (who also put a lot of work into the Status Quo reissues mentioned elsewhere on this blog) and blogger/journalist Paul Sinclair, who first wrote about his involvement here and later published an exclusive interview here, parts of which were used for his liner notes in the set. During the promotion for the reissue, the band unveiled their first new recording since 2006, a cover of Arcade Fire's "Ready to Start"; it was swiftly followed by "And I Was a Boy from School" by Hot Chip and Animal Collective's "My Girls". All three songs were later compiled on a 12" vinyl EP for Record Store Day called Ready Boy & Girls? (but never released on CD). As this round of publicity ended, Tears for Fears announced they were starting to write material for a new album. The sound of the three cover versions hinted at a more electronic direction as opposed to the timeless piano- and guitar-based power pop of Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.



2014 saw the next reissue, among other versions an exhaustive 6-disc box set, centered around Songs from The Big Chair, and The Seeds of Love was expected for 2015. The band still played great live shows, including the Spotify Landmark session, but spanners started appearing in the works. Several self-imposed deadlines for finishing the new album were missed and it felt like neither the new album nor the Seeds reissue would see the light of day.

2017 was the most active year for TFF since their reunion: A big double headliner tour with Hall & Oates took them all over North America, and they also appeared on the BBC in London to promote their new compilation Rule the World, which featured two new songs, the single "I Love You But I'm Lost" and "Stay". However, with hindsight it was a dark time for Orzabal, as first his old writing partner Alan Griffiths died at only 57, and then (unbeknownst to the public), his wife Caroline died after a long struggle with depression, alcoholism and ensuing health issues. The only thing fans knew was that the last dates of the US tour were postponed because of a "family emergency", and later, the European tour scheduled for 2018 was cancelled "on doctor's orders" and moved to 2019. (The upshot of this was that they added more dates in Germany and I finally got to see them!) Earlier that year, Roland had uploaded a sad ballad to his soundcloud account called "Please Be Happy", which also hinted at the emotional turmoil in his family. Here's a fan video (which looks like it was an inspiration for the new official video!):


When the band resurfaced in 2019, Orzabal's hair had turned grey and he was starting to grow a beard. Though stopping to dye his hair increased the contrast, it was pretty clear to anybody that he had aged a lot since 2015/2016. His voice also seemed less powerful, especially on the first couple of gigs, but got stronger as the tour progressed. In the meantime, he found a new partner and according to his own account, that immensely helped to get him back on track after "losing a year".

In 2020, Roland suggested the band would release a handful of singles instead of an album, and "The Tipping Point" was slated for an April release, but that date came and went. No tour dates had been set for the year so none were sunk by the pandemic, but it seemed like the new record was indefinitely shelved. Roland later explained that they had an album but weren't happy with it, and went back to work on new material to use alongside some of the originally planned songs. All in all, more waiting.

2020 did finally see the reprint of the first two box sets, a Classic Albums documentary dealing with Songs from the Big Chair and later, the long-awaited box set centered around The Seeds of Love, something that had been put on the backburner for several times because it shouldn't collide with the new album. The hints that something was finally happening in TFF-land appeared in mid-2021: Curt Smith liked a tweet by his friend, music journalist David Wild, which enigmatically hinted at a band having made their "best album yet". Wild denied most of the suspicions except TFF, and later confirmed that he had interviewed Roland and Curt.

The new single - which turned out to be, indeed, the title track - premiered on October 7; BBC Radio 2 were first to play it, while Radio Bath followed a few minutes later. Both stations played a radio edit, while the official video and streaming services had the full cut shortly afterwards.

After living with the song for a few weeks, here is my current verdict.


The intro may actually be the best part of the song. It's subtle, it's suspenseful, and it conjures up a sonic world all of its own. There's a kinship with Roland's experiments on the
Tomcats Screaming Outside album but also 1993's Elemental, and interestingly enough Pink Floyd's 1994 album The Division Bell (the little bits of e-bow guitar aren't unlike the clip that was woven into "Take It Back" and "Keep Talking).

The beat slowly builds up over a couple of interesting movements and what follows is basically - as Roland Orzabal attested - Charlton Pettus' attempt to match the many young hit producers who thought the thing to do with TFF was to remake their classics. Pettus took the shuffle beat from "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and inserted a piano motif reminiscent of "Head over Heels" to build the basis of the song, ending up with something that sounded like neither but still like Tears for Fears. The similarity to "Rule the World" was obviously picked up by most listeners but it would be wrong to call the new single a remake, as the vocal melody is totally different.

The melody - which I assume is mostly Roland's work - is indeed strong, and the way that Curt and Roland duet on the song is an element that immediately stood out. For all the strengths of having two frontmen, it's something they didn't really make much use of. Only "The Hurting", "Mothers Talk", "Sowing the Seeds of Love" and "Closest Thing to Heaven" spring to mind. Live it's a different story, as more recent performances of "Memories Fade" prove.

There are negatives, though. Some people pointed out that the song sounds a bit Depeche Mode. A lot of classic Mode songs are entirely built on the minor pentatonic, and the melody of "The Tipping Point" mostly stays within these limits too. Unfortunately, the backing is even more simplistic. I tried playing along on the piano and got bored very quickly as the main part of the song is just three chords (the same ones as in "Shout") over and over. They are also pretty much the same chords as in David Gilmour's 2016 song "Rattle That Lock", but that may well be a coincidence. Though this isn't the only touching point between the two songs: The way the radio version of "The Tipping Point" opens with Curt singing "Who's that ghost" reminds me of the echoing "Rattle That Lock" in Gilmour's song.

So what's left is the arrangement.

As I said, I have nothing but love for the intro. But the comparisons to "The Working Hour" seem more than a little over the top; nothing that follows the intro is as musically adventurous as that 1985 song was, which seamlessly fused together very different musical ideas.

The long version of "The Tipping Point" at least contains, in addition to the spherical intro, an instrumental breakdown that helps to add some variety, although the beat isn't varied at all and there is never a new chord to be found.

I like a lot of the sonic tricks, which are very typical for Roland's production work. The exception is the white noise added at times, something I really wish hadn't become fashionable. Sadly, the very compressed mastering makes it hard to focus on any of these details because (psychoacoustically) the brain shuts off when it's hit with a barrage of sound.

Lyrically, Roland is pretty open about the inspiration. It's a very personal song about the experience of watching his wife fade away - becoming a ghost while still alive.

The lyrics get a full 10/10 from me. They are haunting and on point, and entirely worth of the TFF name. I also like how the phrases get swapped at the end, it makes for a nice variation (instead of ending predictably with the title).

There is also the typical self-reference in the lyrics, in the line "What's that shape", which comes straight from 1996's "Falling Down".


I thought it would be an interesting idea to compare "I Love You But I'm Lost" and "The Tipping Point" in various aspects. Both songs came after a long period of silence and both signalled the beginning of something new; in the case of the 2017 single, it turned out to be a false alarm, and a bit of a cul-de-sac as the album that apparently was almost ready for release back then was not issued in its original form.

But both songs were co-produced with the same team - Florian Reutter and Sacha Skarbek - so they share a common aesthetic as opposed to, say, "Floating Down the River". Skarbek also co-wrote two songs on the coming album (in one case with Reutter), so even though the band has decided to remove "I Love You But I'm Lost" from the album, it remains a part of the same "era".



MELODY

Both songs are melodically strong and it's hard to choose. I think "I Love You But I'm Lost" may be more obviously catchy but that obviousness is also its weakness, as - with a different arrangement and singer - it could easily pass as a song by any number of younger acts (Bastille's singer Dan Smith and their producer Mark Crew co-wrote it). "The Tipping Point" is more recognizable as a TFF song, but "...Lost" is the one that keeps going through my brain unprompted, so I'm not going to choose.

1 : 1

CHORDS

Perhaps surprisingly, "I Love You But I'm Lost" has a more interesting chord sequence. It's not spectacularly inventive but they change it around enough to keep it fresh. The middle eight ("All we needed was some time") especially helps there.

2 : 1

LYRICS

"The Tipping Point" wins this one. "I Love You..." isn't bad, and especially in retrospect it is recognizable as coming from the same mindset (lines like "came to life in my arms and then turned to dust"). Hindsight makes it a far more bitter lyric; Roland telling Caroline that he loves her but is lost as to how to help her. However, some of the lines seem kind of throwaway to me.

"The Tipping Point" fits in the TFF tradition. I'm reminded of this Orzabal quote from 1995:

I think that the perspective behind Tears For Fears is one of that things are slightly damaged, things are slightly disturbed and they need to be healed, they need to be made better. I think that is running through every album... (source)

Incidentally, I feel that this aspect was noticeably missing on the Everybody Loves a Happy Ending album. It was a record about death, mostly, but it didn't feel justified. The guys were only in their forties.

2 : 2

PRODUCTION

Both songs are very much in the synthpop vein, dominated by electronic sounds and underpinned by "traditional sounding" but programmed drums. They don't sound "retro" though, in the sense of how some of the old 80s bands like Visage or Camouflage have tried to avoid the modern traps of overproduction, and that's where my main grumbles lie.

I'm somebody who mostly leans towards the rocky and organic side of things. My two favourite TFF albums are The Seeds of Love and Raoul and the Kings of Spain, so the move back towards more electronic sounds was always going to be a tougher road for me. As far as I'm concerned, I also don't need to hear anything from TFF that involves the guy who co-wrote the horrific "You're Beautiful" with James Blunt (as well as other not particularly great radio hits like "7 Seconds" or Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball"), and I generally despise the trend to throw lots and lots of "producers" at a song to end up with an unremarkable overproduced stew of frequencies and electronic noise. This is what plagues "I Love You But I'm Lost" especially.

"The Tipping Point" at least has some typical guitar chords by Roland on the intro, but the instrument rather quickly disappears. Still, the more typical production touches swing this one for the newer song.

2 : 3

MIX

Both songs aren't particularly well-mixed. They drown in mids and low frequencies; I find it very hard to pick out the actual bass. The slightly better drum sound causes me to give the nod to the newer track again.

I have a strong feeling that "The Tipping Point" will open up much more when the band plays it live. Of course I can't be sure that it's going to be played (neither two new songs from 2017 were ever done) but Curt especially said they wanted to have an album that was well suited to playing live.

2 : 4

MASTERING

Mastering is a strange part of music making. Everybody does it but its original purpose has been forgotten and perverted. Because LPs have less dynamic range than magnetic tape and also only allow for a certain amount of bass, it was necessary to perform some EQ'ing and dynamic compression / limiting to get the sound right for the format. (This is also the reason why songs are often better sounding on 12" singles than on LPs, as there is more space for the grooves and therefore for bass.)

With the advent of CD, the dynamic range of released music increased to show off the new medium's capabilities. But then engineers discovered that you could do things in the digital realm that were previously near impossible. Digital lookahead limiters allow for a much more extreme raising of the overall loudness to the maximum (which is defined as 0 dB in any digital file). Producers, especially in pop and when it came to the jukebox market, had long liked their recordings to be louder than the competition, but the new tools turned that quest up to eleven.

Tears for Fears used to be a bastion of good sound, but that ended with the reunion. Back then it was Stephen Marcussen (who just outperformed himself in mastering the most recent Rolling Stones reissue into complete oblivion, breaking his own loudness records) who made the US release of Everybody Loves a Happy Ending the band's loudest release by far, while somebody decided that this was not loud enough and added further compression to the UK and European release (the one with 2 bonus tracks), leading to a steamrollered, flat sound that doesn't manage to keep the listener's attention for more than two tracks in a row.

The DR meter is a software that analyses how much a song has been affected by the loudness war. It doesn't measure the difference between the loudest and quietest parts but the density of the loudest parts. In other words, how much does the music vary in amplitude near digital zero.

On the DR meter, none of the new music and not even much of the reissues released by Tears for Fears in the last 25 years scores well. In comparison, the original mastering of The Seeds of Love (which was also included on the Blu-Ray disc of the 2020 box set) still stands up as a good example of a dynamic mastering.

As I wrote down at length here, Everybody Loves a Happy Ending was a real low point, especially in the 14-track version. "I Love You But I'm Lost" and "Stay" score similarly low on the DR meter (both DR5). They have a slightly lower RMS (average volume) but the density of the mix on the former is so extreme that when it kicks in, it feels like a sonic assault.

"The Tipping Point" (DR6) is a bit better, but both songs are mastered abysmally. I'm giving zero points on this count. They just turn into a wall of noise on headphones. If you don't believe me, try switching back and forth between any song from the first five TFF albums and the new material; the difference shouldn't be subtle.

The horrible sound of modern CDs and digital files has been one of the main drivers of the vinyl revival, so it's reasonable to expect the LP sounding better, although that's not a given. There have been cases where dedicated files with less compression were used for the vinyl editions (the Tears for Fears Record Store Day release Live at Massey Hall is an excellent example); often enough the cutting engineer simply takes some of the bass off, which improves the DR without really restoring anything. In some cases (Clockwork Angels by Rush springs to mind) that still makes it easier to listen without getting a headache, as a lot of energy can be concentrated in those low frequencies.

2 : 4

VIDEO

I don't want to give marks for the video clips but "The Tipping Point" also wins that comparison, as it's a simple mix of Curt and Roland singing and a couple of strong visual images, therefore well in the tradition of the band's 80s clips. "I Love You But I'm Lost" wasn't even advertised with a video at first and when it was released, it turned out to be a rather weird story-video that didn't even feature the band.

So all in all, "The Tipping Point" bodes better for the coming album then "I Love You But I'm Lost" did in 2017 for the scrapped album, still I have some reservations.

I know some people will question my even being a fan. But it's a question of emotions. Was I happy to get new material? Yes. Do I think "The Tipping Point" is a good song? Sure. But whenever I hear "Sowing the Seeds of Love" on the radio, it's a rush of emotions, it's pure bliss. And the same goes for quite a few other TFF songs. In comparison, anything they've released more recently has been a bit limp/grey. It's good music but it just doesn't make me feel much. I'm glad it exists, but either the production brings it down instead of enhancing it, or maybe I just don't 'get it'.


As far as the other two songs we already know go, I'd say "Please Be Happy" is the best so far (judging from the demo version, which criminally also has a huge amount of compression baked in - on a demo!!). "Stay" has the main problem that it sounds like Curt's solo work. While he is a good writer, he doesn't have Roland's genius. Also, it's very reliant on electronics, therefore not a good live track.

I hope that any song Curt didn't like and that was therefore discarded will show up on an Orzabal solo record. Considering how much I like the second half of The Seeds of Love (unlike Curt) there should be some very strong material.

But I also assume the coming album will contain songs that impress me more than the title track. After all, "Closest Thing to Heaven", the first single from Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, wasn't its strongest track either. And I'm glad I caught the opportunity to grab the special edition that Paul Sinclair managed to negotiate with the band and label, which contains all three bonus tracks that are otherwise only available in separate markets, plus an exclusive interview. Regardless of how much I'll end up liking the album, that is one of the coolest ideas I've seen in the CD business.

By the way, the next single "No Small Thing" will be out on December 3. Since it was described as containing acoustic portions (as you can hear in the preview clip), I'm having rather high expectations for this song.

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