It's been over a decade since the runaway success of the Massive Attack collaboration and then the subsequent, also highly successful, Everything But the Girl dance pop reinvention. After 1999's Temperamental, Thorn and Watt disbanded their own group and went to work on their respective solo projects. Thorn's first output was 2007's Out of the Woods, a veritable chocolate box of alternative electro-folk-pop gems.
On new album Love and Its Opposite Thorn has evidently returned to her true artistic self. No longer working professionally with husband Ben Watt, she now releases music of contemporary folk, where there's not a pop song in sight, but the odd, subtle dance flourish quietly betrays her experience on the frontline of the Top40 warzone.
The album is languid and soothing, like a balmy, slow summer afternoon. It has something faintly operatic about it - I suspect it's the deliberately, accurately detailed vocal melodies - her singing is clean, high and central in the mix. The accompaniment is selected for variety and squeezed firmly to the edges of the tracks, almost as if the vocals were recorded firstly and acapella, and the music added later. She variously seeks to accentuate the mood through the use of playful, sitting room piano, gentle acoustic guitar, or washing, soft strings - but the emphasis is steadfastly on the vocal - which is always weaving, always unformulaic, mostly un-rhymed. One can tell she takes her poetry and her art seriously in the way each syllable is delicately placed on exactly the right beat, and exactly the right note.
Lyrically, Thorn explores the suburban adult themes of failed relationships and damaged hopes, dubious affairs and wistful fantasies (I'm determined not to use the cliched "housewife" here - it's neither fair nor accurate). The narrative viewpoint has a measured, wry and sometimes pained outlook... without falling into melodrama or cliche. Opener "Oh, The Divorces!" presents Thorn as a sardonic observer of both the gossip, and the very real fallout from the collapsing marriages of friends (".. oh, oh... the honeymoon... the wedding rings... the afternoon handovers by the swings").
"Long White Dress" looks back at a girl's coming of age and her young fear of the sheer finality of the adult world. An uncommitted partner is grappled with on "Why Does the Wind? ( - blow through my house at night, why does the wind blow through my heart each time I look into your eyes...)" There's a deliberate ambiguity in the way she sings of "you" and "me" - the songs are intimately personal, but at the same time they don't have the unvarnished, direct, rawness that usually comes with the autobiographical (let's say, Tori Amos for example). Track six is "You are a lover";
You are a lover, from today... (this is the first day)
can you afford to dump a friend? (one friend less)
will you ignore me again? (once again)
will he, always be there?
Like any good poet, she draws on both the imagined and the real to conjure a brew that's more vivid to the listener.
My own highlight is the achingly deep, ponderous soul of "Kentish Town" - strongly referencing the oeuvre of earlier EBTG. It's an album ideal for a grown-up dinner party, perhaps one followed by a risque game of truth or dare.
"Oh, the Divorces! (live at home version)" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9h1ooI2iMg
Love and Its Opposite by Tracey Thorn, released on BuzzinFly Records, available to download on emusic.com
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