Caught in the Carousel

Tracey Thorn

Love and Its Opposite
Merge

Tracey Thorn

"Good luck with that," is what I expect as a response to endless Google queries as to whether or not Everything But The Girl is still together. If Google had been in business ten years ago, I'd have had the same dry spat of luck with asking whether the multi-talented duo of Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt were married.

Well, it turns out they are (were?) married. However, they have not had an official release of new material since 1999's intoxicating Temperamental. And since then Ben Watt has worked with myriad electronica outfits (musically, not like PG&E) and Tracey Thorn has done a few guest vocals before releasing 2007's slightly fey and slightly disappointing Out of the Woods.

Throughout the flood of recent press interviews Thorn is riding for the release of her new album, Love and Its Opposite, it still isn't clear what's going on with EBTG; in fact it's only gotten murkier. The songs here are orchestrated by loss and disappointment. The first single, "Oh! The Divorces" sounds thoroughly Sondheim. In a Broadway musical it would be the ingenue's solo: the youngest daughter of a society family at the piano just after learning that all those marriages she admired had broken up before she herself even has a chance to venture into that institution. But this isn't Sondheim. It's Tracey Thorn and it sure sounds autobiographical. But then again, the record has been released on Ben Watt's label...

I know people who liked the television show Scrubs when it was on NBC but not when it was on ABC. They argue it's a different product entirely. In the same sense, I suppose, I kind of expect a Tracey Thorn album to by all rights be stellar pop music. I can't for the life of me figure out why EBTG albums have a shelf-life that Tracey Thorn's do not. On first listening, the new album is vintage EBTG. Thorn's voice is the warmest cold voice you'll ever hear. It is hypnotic in its near pitch-perfect purr that seems awfully close to monotone.

But the first three songs seem to have that same harmless, folk music that was far too jejune for a woman of Thorn's age on the previous album. Now she's three years older and though the lyrics seem less nostalgic, the music is as darned placid as of Sade's Soldier of Love; the two albums both seem to have been sent too bed too early.

"Kentish Town," arrives just in time and one feels as if he's wearing gauze over his ears while listening to the song. It is filtered in a non-studio way. It's just diffused somehow and it haunts and haunts as if sorrow got hold of your unlisted phone number. By song's end Thorn is finding her place and in the next track lays down five minutes of heaven with "Why Does the Wind?" If by December 31, 2010 I have heard five minutes of better music than this, it will have been a great year in pop music. The song finds its beat and drives the number down the road, full throttle.

It's a shame that the confidence that track does for the album only shows again in the two duets, the best being a lovely and disarming take on Lee Hazelwood's "Come On Home to Me," wherein Jens Lekman sounds as if he makes a fine, fine living by comforting with malice. On the last track, the lovely "Swimming" Cortney Tidwell does a fine Björk backing vocal (the volcano must have kept Björk at home), and you think, wow, Thorn's done it this time.

A week later, however, you realize you've played "Why Does the Wind?" 441 times and "Come On Home to Me" visits you in your darkest sleep (thanks, Jens), but that's about it. It doesn't linger there. You don't call it up the minute the annoying iTunes update notice has been ignored. It just doesn't infiltrate the way almost every EBTG album has done and-now and again—still does. It just doesn't.

In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep waiting for an Everything But the Girl album to arrive. And if, somewhere down the road, there's an official announcement that EBTG has retired, I'm gonna start a write-in campaign for them to return to NBC.

—Thomas Cooney