(Buzzin’ Fly/Virgin)
Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have absorbed the revolutions in dance and electronic music since their previous album in 1999, and shaped them into melancholic, finely detailed stories
This week, Everything But the Girl’s social media accounts posted some previously lost footage of the duo around the time of their debut album, 1984’s Eden. A riot of extravagantly spiked hair, filthy-looking London streets and indoor smoking, the clips act as a time capsule and a reminder of the milieu from which the duo sprang: a grimier, greyer, more earnest 1980s than pop cultural nostalgia – with its rouged new romantics and yuppies bellowing into enormous mobile phones – usually allows.
It was all a very long time ago. Bands who reform decades on from their breakthrough tend to follow a set path: warmly received live shows playing the hits, followed by a new album designed to evoke fond memories of the way they – and their fans – once were. But Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn were never a band minded to abide by anything but a desire, as Thorn once put it, “to defy categorisation even at the risk of losing a guaranteed audience”. Eden established them among a wave of artists dubbed new jazz, but they never made an album that sounded like it again: theirs is a back catalogue in which slick modern soul chafes against kitchen-sink-drama indie and deep house, where lavish 60s orchestrations fight for space with drum’n’bass inspired by Peshay and Alex Reece.
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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