Everything But The Girl make an essential return.
It will probably have overwhelmed them a little, but when Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt announced the release of a first Everything But The Girl album in twenty-four years, the public’s response was quite emotional.
Intelligent, literate, metropolitan – for the duo such an outpouring might have felt like an overreaction, perhaps a little embarrassing, but its origins were undeniable.
From their early fascination with jazz (almost heretical in the post-punk dominated early eighties) to Todd Terry’s anthemic remix of Missing that gave succor to the heartbroken weekend raver, few other catalogues have pulled off the spell of being diverse and relatable with such poise.
Famously, the last straw for Everything But The Girl back in the day was a phone call from U2’s management offering them a support slot on one of their gargantuan, planet hopping tours.
Ninety-nine artists out of a hundred were taking the gig(s) – they said no however, and after some time out to start a family both moved on to lower key, happier solo careers.
The idea of making a new record together never came up until the lockdown era however, and such was the nervousness about possibility that even when the process had begun files containing early rough work were labelled simply TREN to identify them as the work of just Tracey and Ben.
Perhaps given the traditionally underwhelming returns of these exercises, their hyper-loyal audience may have felt a similar sense of doubt but when the pre-album single Nothing Left To Lose arrived the pieces immediately fell back in place.
Downtempo, melancholic but employing wall rattling sub-bass, it was a track that looked to the present but emphatically restated all of Everything But The Girl’s well-loved qualities: the new TREN was proving to be as embraceable the old one.
With only ten tracks and a running time that barely nudges over thirty-five minutes, Fuse has an austerity of both form and structure.
Rarely comfortable with overstatement, from the producer’s chair Watt’s touches are subtle. The one revolutionary conceit is in bending Thorn’s voice into alien shapes, as on When You Mess Up, a trick the singer was hugely supportive of, a device acknowledging that in the last two decades the pop landscape they once knew has become a playground for experimentation.
It’s also an environment which has darkened, and in places the lyrics are a reflection of both that and lived experiences, a greyer horizon evoked on Lost with, ‘I could never cry/And I never wondered why” or in Forever’s demands to “Do away with cruelty/Do away with pain’.
Fuse’s prevailing mood though is one of resigned happiness, a feeling manifest in how the spectral dancers of Run A Red Light are portrayed, the song a portrait of the grit and tiny romance of lives in which any space for joy has been squeezed to almost nothing.
Musically the formula remains beguilingly simple throughout; a twisted synth drop here, a skittered beat there on the closer Karaoke, whilst Caution To The Wind’s handclaps are so slight they may as well be those of children.
The best moment though comes with No-One Knows We’re Dancing, its warmly Balearic pads and airy harmonies the closest overt nod to any dancefloor.
Almost inexplicably, it feels like Everything But The Girl’s place was bookmarked for the last quarter of a century. Fuse is a progression from their 20th century work, but its creative seamlessness with the past means Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn can still choose to articulate themselves with a newer, flawed humanity.
In suburbia and beyond, long smothered emotions now have a place in which to run high again.
