TOMMY

Pete Townshend's obsessive quest to express his concerns about the feeling of not fitting into a harsh and aggressive world, ends up giving life in "Tommy" (1969), the Who's fourth album, to a traumatised child who from birth suffers terrible situations that make him retreat deep inside himself, falling into a kind of post-traumatic autism until his amazing ability to play pinball games among other things helps him return to the outside world and become a massive phenomenon.

And beyond a few thematically nonsensical episodes, "Tommy" has an enormous instrumental and harmonic fluidity, appreciable from the very introduction with the orchestrated "Overture", a medley that functions as a teaser for the following tracks, with a solvent and very loquacious Townshend with the acoustic guitar in songs of overflowing musicality even in their acoustic simplicity as in the brief "Its a Boy" and "Tommy Can You Hear Me", or in the medieval- scented opening chords of "Welcome", and an impeccable band that backs him up to generate countless moments of melodic brilliance, as in the tragic "1921" (excellent vocal interplay), the suffocating and urgent "Eyesight To The Blind (The Hawker)" and "Christmans" (heartbreaking Roger Daltrey), the painful "Cousin Kevin" (another great choral set), the incredible "Pinball Wizard" (fantastic acoustic and electric riffs by Townshend), or the energetic "Go to the Mirror!" (another great electric guitar riff).

And after tracing the life of the troubled character, "Tommy" reserves for its closing section the imperishable "We're Not Gonna Take It / See Me, Feel Me/ Listening To You" with the stupendous rhythm that Keith Moon and John Entwistle structure for the chorus and Daltrey's singing, in one of the pieces that helped install The Who in the definitive Olympus of rock heroes.

One of the many examples of the repercussions of an album that transcended frontiers is the detail of the father of former Spanish tennis player Tommy Robredo (number 5 in the ATP world ranking in the 2000s), who named his son in honour of the English rock-opera.

Indispensable.

4/4.5 stars