A Sense of Doubt blog post #3040 - How Come You Didn't Tell Me Everything But the Girl has a New ALBUM???? FUSE reviewed - also Not Music Monday Music Post
So, I have this thing I do.
It used to be easy. I would just stop at the Michigan News Agency in Kalamazoo on my way home. After awhile, I learned that the owner would save them for me to pick up.
I found a cool new site -- ALBUM OF THE YEAR -- a source for reviews.
Three reviews here: Mojo Magazine, Albumism, and the very cool and interesting God in the TV.
These reviews speak to the new EBTG much better than I can, but I will say that I have been nearly playing it on repeat since buying it.
I am also biased as a huge EBTG fan.
Everything But The Girl - FUSE - full album playlist (official)
There's a review aggregator for music album reviews??
https://www.albumoftheyear.org/album/565878-everything-but-the-girl-fuse.php
First review is from Mojo Magazine (of course).
https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/everything-but-the-girl-reviewed/
Everything But The Girl Reviewed
Read MOJO’s verdict on Fuse, Everything But The Girl’s first new album in 24 years
|The distinctive pop duo release their first album in 24 years, a homage to love and the dancefloor.
Everything But The Girl
★★★★
Fuse
After a long hiatus during which Tracey Thorn wrote four non-fiction books, Ben Watt focused on DJ-production work, and both released six solo albums between them, UK pop’s enduring pair have re-formed to create an album that fuses emotional strength with their musical obsessions.
They have certainly benefited from time apart. Thorn has said that singing on their last album, 1999’s trip-hop-infused Temperamental, felt like guesting on someone else’s record, but with Fuse her voice is front, central and confidently clear in the mix. So too is their cleverly sculpted sonic overload, weaving in and out of evocative lyrical imagery and rhythmic flow. It sounds like they are enjoying each other’s company. No more the quieter introspection and reflection of solo tracks like Hormones or Fever Dream – here Thorn and Watt are a combined force, capturing the giddy euphoria and release of the club experience.
Opener Nothing Left To Lose articulates this concept beautifully, with Thorn’s voice deep and disembodied within the sub-bass and fractured beats, importuning a lover to “kiss me while the world decays.” There is an end-of-days feel to the song, where wordplay and repetition are used like mantras, a hypnotic approach that is echoed throughout the album. Run A Red Light explores the club world from a different angle, the resident DJ who likes to, “Keep it simple/Keep it the same crowd”, but who is longing for something bigger and better. Watt adds to the sense of containment with iPhone piano loops that morph into a looped bank of choral sound à la 10cc’s I’m Not In Love, only much more compressed than the lush melancholy of the 1970s hit. “When we listened back in the studio, we did think, Oh that sounds quite 10cc,” says Watt. “But it wasn’t intentional. I wanted the song to end with a dreamlike ether.”
From debut Eden’s bossa nova jazz to the American pop soul of the Tommy LiPuma-produced The Language Of Life, to the liquid drum’n’bass of 1996’s Walking Wounded, Everything But The Girl have always experimented with different influences. Caution To The Wind, for example, with its clapping synth beats and celestial lyrics, summons up late-’80s New York garage and the joyful defiance of Turntable Orchestra. And the elemental dancefloor chug of Forever reverberates with a Mirwais-style mixture of French house groove and lyrics laced with existential ache. “Who’ll be around/When everything burns down?” Thorn sings. “Give me something I can hold onto forever.” These tracks are propelled by a sense of urgency and resistance to over-complication, simplifying music to its essence.
There is also an acceptance of life’s chaos. The song When You Mess Up, delivered in the form of advice to wayward offspring (the couple have three children, now in their early twenties), disintegrates towards the end into a glitchy drift of piano loops, distortion and fluff. “Christ, we all mess up,” Thorn reassures. From there, a natural segue into Time And Time Again, where trap beats and warped vocals tell the stories of people caught in repetitive love scenarios of loneliness and self-isolation, always hoping but never achieving what they yearn for.
EBTG often bring a keen social observation to their lyrics, and Fuse is populated with characters seeking escape, abandonment, and self-release. Like the guy in No One Knows We’re Dancing, whose “parking tickets litter his Fiat Cinquecento”, or the girl who “works weekdays in a pet shop”, or Peter behind the bar with a lawyer father working (in a nod to M’s Pop Muzik) “London, Paris, Rome.” While Thorn sings about these weekend clubbers “trapped in a feeling” on the dancefloor, enveloping synth chords create a majestic sense of space and freedom.
In one way, this album could be heard as a trip through the night, from stepping out early evening to messy abandonment in the club, to rebuilding and rediscovering the self at the end of the night. The track Lost captures a mid-rave moment of emotional falling apart at the seams, as compulsive thoughts intrude; Thorn itemises each thing that has been lost – “I lost my mind last week… my bags… my biggest client… the perfect job… the plot.” Heightened by chiming cyclical synth notes, the lyrics are delivered with a Zen shrug. Until we hear about a deeper, underlying and more significant loss, repeated three times in the final phrase: “I lost my mother.”
EBTG often make deft work of the personal and political, or the linking of one’s internal monologue with a broader context. With the track Interior Space, they take the mood off the dancefloor and into a wild seascape, incorporating field recordings by their engineer Bruno Ellingham of Druidstone Beach, a secluded spot in Pembrokeshire enclosed on three sides by steep cliffs. This is a high point of the album, a spectral piece of sonic architecture that melds, with Arca-like precision, Thorn and Watt’s voices into one elemental flow.
That vocal interplay between them continues into the final track Karaoke, only here it separates into call and response – hers deep and soulful, his light and harmonising – like a charged conversation. This is their ‘lost in music’ moment, a summation of why they do what they do, and how Thorn, terrified of performing live for several years, rediscovers what she loves about singing. There is wry observation of a slow karaoke night, when “I was in the groove/Someone tried some Dylan/But the place remained unmoved”, and how this can be changed with the right songs, good pitch, a communal mood and an invitation: “If you want you can own it/Why not take a shot?” As the record concludes, bathed in low-slung beats and shimmering sound, there is a sense that the dancefloor and the karaoke bar offer safety, places where nagging fears and anxiety can be banished.
https://albumism.com/reviews/everything-but-the-girl-fuse
From 1982 to 2000, Everything But The Girl carved an unpredictable journey in pop music for themselves by being left-of-center, forward-thinking, and full of surprises.
Their studio albums genre-hopped through jazz and bossa nova (1984’s Eden,) soulful orchestral balladry (1986’s Baby, The Stars Shine Bright,) sophisto-pop (1988’s Idlewild) and electronic dance music (1996’s Walking Wounded and 1999’s Temperamental). You could sense from these recordings that Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt were constantly curious, quietly rebellious, and musically mercurial.
When they disbanded professionally as a duo in 2000 after 18 years of making music together, the split came as a surprise because they were at the top of their game. After American DJ/Producer Todd Terry’s remix of “Missing” from their 1994 album Amplified Heart became a surprise global pop hit (US #2 / UK #3) they jumped genres again to electronic-based music in 1996 with Walking Wounded—which became their best-selling album.
Three years later they doubled down on elegant beat-driven songs with Temperamental—an album that solidified them as purveyors of decadent dance music affectingly anchored by deeply drawn explorations of human behavior crafted into introspective song lyrics.
In the years since their decades-long hiatus, they raised three children (their son, Blake, picked up the family business with his indie band Family Stereo), authored books, ran record labels, and recorded critically acclaimed solo albums.
For over two decades, Thorn and Watt would say that Everything But The Girl was in the past. When I interviewed Watt in 2020 a few months before the pandemic, he remarked about the pressure from fans to fire EBTG up again by telling me, “We’re doing this now, you know? We did that, now we’re doing this.” Everything But The Girl’s story was assumed to be over. Done. In the rear view. Actually, VERY far in the rear view.
It’s now over 40 years since Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn met at Hull University, already part of the post-punk world. Over the following twenty years they would have a number of musical reinventions, and a lot of very deserved critical and commercial success (go investigate) before going on hiatus in 2000. Since then, despite being a couple they haven’t collaborated much though there have been some excellent solo albums and books written by the pair individually. Given that for a long time, it seemed they were unlikely to do another album together as Everything But The Girl, it was a matter of rejoicing for those of us who loved them when they announced that they would be releasing their tenth album, and first since 1999’s Temperamental.
Not only that, it’s a matter for celebrating that this album is so utterly brilliant. Album opener ‘Nothing Left To Lose’ was the first single to be released back in January, suggesting they had set the bar very high for the rest of the album. The duo had started to involve different strands of dance and electronica in their music from 1994’s Amplified Heart onwards (and not just that remix), and what we have here is an that manages to be both for the feet and for the heart.
It’s melancholic yet not a depressing album. See, while the lyrics of songs may seem sad, there’s something about this album that is affirming and uplifts the soul. On ‘Forever‘ Thorn sings ‘give me something I could hold onto forever/give me something I could hold onto whatever.‘ This is delivered in a way that is not plaintive, but rather suggests hope. It can be infectious, after all. It also feels – and this is meant as a compliment – very contemporary and comfortable like that. There are occasions when acts attempt to update their sound and it feels like they’re trying too hard, and the attempt struggles (there are plenty of examples; you can pick your own). That isn’t the case here. And whatever some might think, there are links with their music that go back to the eighties, and the spirit of the duo is in their songwriting as much as their sound. Whether the king and queen of the bedsit bossa-nova as they were portrayed in the eighties, or going out on the town, there’s still that link that whatever the changes between their first hit ‘Each And Every One‘ and this brilliant collection of new songs, on which there is not a duff track.
I hope there’ll be another Everything But The Girl album. If there isn’t, this will be a very fine way to end the band. If there is, then the strength of this record shows that they continue to fire on all cylinders.
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- Days ago = 2904 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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