Temperamental, Everything But the Girl (Atlantic)
Dance-Cry-Dance Music
Tracey Thorn's voice is at its seductive, mournful
best here.
By Douglas Wolk
Todd Terry's pumping 1995 remix of Everything But
The Girl's wistful tune "Missing" was a fluke hit for the
band, but it was also a great big shove in the right
direction: singer Tracey Thorn sounded good in the
context of the mellow pop songs she and
multi-instrumentalist Ben Watt had been playing for
13 years, but she sounded amazing as a simmering
disco diva. Temperamental scales down the drum &
bass beats that skittered across Walking Wounded
(1996) in favor of the deep house of American dance
clubs and gyms. Heard as dance music, it's a subtler
version of the better Razor-N-Guido or Hex Hector
productions, with ratcheting fragments of Thorn's
voice tossed across her lead vocals. The beat/ bass
strategies refer obliquely to techstep (dance
subgenre popularized by Ed Rush, DJ Trace and Nico)
("Compression") and Soul II Soul ("Downhill Racer"),
but they mostly update the last decade's worth of
house just enough to sound very 1999, with lavish
billows of keyboard blossoming everywhere. The disc
booms, it repeats itself, it defies the narrative of the
pre-written song: you can dance to it, and nothing
will distract you.
The brilliance of Temperamental is that it
works as a bittersweet singer/ songwriter album, too
霠you just have to treat the lyrics as the focus of
attention rather than as the window dressing they usually
are in house music. The catch phrases that Thorn
repeats throughout "The Future Of The Future",
EBTG's collaboration with Deep Dish 霠"it's so bright/
tonight," "whatcha gonna do about me now" 霊gradually cohere into a lyric about willingness to live
beyond the present, and shift perspective from
abstract philosophy to a lover's plea. The verse of
"Hatfield 1980" (RealAudio excerpt) has a two-note
melody so as not to get in the way of its old-school
beat and G-funk synth whistle, but the lyrics are
much more chilling than Thorn's low-key delivery
suggests: "I'm seeing my first knife/ My first
ambulance ride."
The album's most powerful track, though, is "Blame"
(RealAudio excerpt), co-produced by J Majik in the
slick post-drum & bass style of his Metalheadz
alliance. Its dub-wise strings swim in and out of the
mix where they would have been a constant presence
for the old EBTG; even when the percussion is
reduced to a single looped cymbal, it implies the
rattling freight-train sound of the clubs, and Thorn's
vocal is properly emotive. But its hook isn't as simple
as its form suggests: "I'm the one to blame," Thorn
sings, a little differently every time, holding onto the
L in "blame." In the song's break, she explains what
she means, dragging it across the beat: "Who let you
down and loved you? That was me again." The
grooves of Temperamental are the formulaic sounds
of joy, but in EBTG's hands, they're also the balm for
heartbreak.
--
gender is just an excuse, relationship shouldn't just be an excuse,
love is often an excuse, although sometimes these excuses are all
we have to hold onto,
death is the reason and living is the celebration
- Beth Orton
--
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