Everything But The Girl – Fuse
More than two decades on from their last record, Everything But The Girl have grown into themselves, forging a sound that is at once deliciously familiar and enhanced by the weight of experience
With the first bassy wub of Nothing Left to Lose, Everything But The Girl have hit unpause on their 24-year hiatus and returned to their maudlin-laced electronica. In many ways, it’s as if they never left. The two-step drive of their garage opener harks back to their magpie-like exploits through clubland in the 1990s, when breakbeat infiltrated their dreamy indie electronic fusion.
But there is one crucial difference, and that’s Tracey Thorn. Of their last record, Temperamental, Thorn has written that “in a sense, I ended up being guest vocalist on someone else’s album”. Not so on Fuse. Ben Watt’s restrained piano and taut, anxiety-laden synths hang back so Thorn can carry the weight. She’s more than up to the task – her voice now fuller, deeper, enriched by experience, and perfectly suited to narrations about seeking light in the darkness.
'Give me something I can hold onto forever', she pleads in an overdubbed falsetto on Forever. 'For god’s sake don’t be so hard on yourself, have another cigarette' gets a full-bodied timbre on When You Mess Up. But it's Nothing Left to Lose's chorus – 'Kiss me while the world decays' – that best encapsulates the record. It smacks of a certain jadedness, which may have come with age – or maybe it’s a symptom of today’s zeitgeist – that is best cured by love and sweet abandon in the dance.
Listen to: Nothing Left to Lose, Forever, Caution to the Wind