Rating: NNN
The first track on Everything But the Girl crooner Tracey Thorn’s first album in eight years (and first solo album in a quarter-century) tricks you into thinking she’s settled down and left dance floors in her distant past. All plush harmonium, airy strings and purred sweet nothings about the ephemeral nature of beauty, Here It Comes Again does nothing to prepare you for the sudden shock of the slick Euro-disco beats, 80s-tastic electro-pop soundtracks for doing aerobics in electric-blue leggings and sultry downtempo chill-out tunes that follow. Admittedly, the sharp focus on Thorn’s cool vocals binds the diverse tracks together, and her lyrics, which take on fucking and memory with the unsentimentally matter-of-fact charm of EBTG’s Mirrorball, are interesting enough to make you want to pay attention to even the most aural-wallpaperish songs. Producer Ewan Pearson occasionally falters in connecting her vocals with the arrangements there’s a nice engagement on the slower, non-beat-driven tracks that you wish he’d mastered on the clubbier cuts.
