Donovan
Essence To Essence

Sooner or later, a misstep had to happen: after all, it had been since those (already antediluvian in 1973) days of "What's Bin Did And What's Bin Hid" aka "Catch The Wind" that Donovan hadn't made a normal album, at best definable as good: from "Fairytale" to "Cosmic Wheels," always and only excellent albums, often reaching peaks of excellence, then with "Essence To Essence" the arc bends. This album was released just a few months after the previous chapter, and Donovan, being the versatile artist he always was, implements yet another stylistic revolution, this time perhaps a bit too hasty and poorly considered: the T. Rexian motifs that characterized "Cosmic Wheels" are abruptly discarded; he veers towards a semi-acoustic style, reflective and essential, as the album title and cover suggest. However, "Essence To Essence" simply fails to fully convince, remaining confined to an uncertain and transitional limbo, neither praised nor criticized, imbued with a subtle but well-perceived sense of boredom and creative stagnation.

But in one thing, Donovan never falters: he has never made an album just for the sake of it; all of his albums, even "What's Bin Did And What's Bin Hid," never sound like mere collections of songs thrown together one after the other: Donovan is like a designer, and each of his albums is a collection that follows a specific leitmotif, not even the mediocre "Essence To Essence" is an exception: in this case, the thread is called lightness, a lightness intended as simplicity, as a renunciation of the glam trick (and rock) of "Cosmic Wheels," a plain and simple album, but it's a pity that such lightness is so intrinsic that it makes "Essence To Essence" an inconsistent album lacking real substance. However, there are nice moments: let's say that, out of a total of eleven songs, at least six are of good level, nothing to rave about, but for a light listening, the cheerful and Caribbean-like atmosphere of "Yellow Star" is suitable, "Life Is A Merry-Go Round" conveys a familiar but always pleasant sense of carefree grace. "There Is An Ocean" and "Sailing Homeward" are two ballads with meditative tones, well arranged and infused with an intense and evocative atmosphere, of great class and refinement; they are the best that "Essence To Essence" has to offer along with the curious "Lazy Daze", which lazily wraps around a circular and alluring rhythm, and "Life Goes On", the album’s cherry on top, distinguished by its lively and witty rhythm, with exquisite catchiness, where the Artist manages to unleash the sublime songster within him (to understand, the Donovan of "Jennifer Juniper," "Pamela Joe," and similar) with a certain touch of refinement in the arrangements, a characteristic that is among the album's strengths and which, if coupled with greater compositional consistency, would have produced another great album if not quite a masterpiece.

In fact, apart from these good episodes, the rest of "Essence To Essence" is really scant: the initial, awful "Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth" despite the bombastic title would top the tracklist of a hypothetical "The Very Worst Of Donovan," a terribly flat uptempo devoid of interest, almost like a commercial jingle, "Dignity Of Man" loses itself in a glass of predictability and golden mediocrity, ruining an otherwise pleasant and well-arranged ballad with an unbearable refrain, "Divine Daze Of Deathless Delight", another grand title, is so soft and ethereal that it becomes almost impalpable and soporific, "Boy For Every Girl" once again features a beautiful melody not fully developed, "Saint Valentine Angel", meh, a trivial ballad, from Donovan one expects much more, and he knows how to do much better.

In short, the idea behind "Essence To Essence" is far from evil: an album with "light" tones enriched with good reflective songwriting and arrangements of great class, never invasive, among others signed by the famous Andrew Loog Oldham. What is missing are the songs themselves; it’s useless to talk about the first impact, had I reviewed it after a couple of listens, the rating would have been two stars, even a bit scarce. It must be said that it grows on you over time, but not to the point of fully convincing: the feeling remains that of an interlocutory and dispensable album, at times dull like its cover despite the inevitable flashes of class where the genius of its author is perceived. "Essence To Essence" will fortunately be just a minor deviation since the two albums that follow it, "7-Tease" and "Slow Down World," are the absolute peaks Donovan reached in the '70s, but we’ll discuss that separately.