Everything But The Girl

★★★★ Walking Wounded BUZZIN’ FLY/CHRYSALIS. LP

Vinyl edition of mutated duo’s 1996 electronic leap forward.

Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn’s mid-’90s metamorphosis now looks remarkable, vividly showing off the power of a great second act. Thrust into a new setting by Todd Terry’s remix of Missing (from 1994’s Amplified Heart), Everything But The Girl turned from the band most likely to launch a small poetry press into ghostly dancefloor apparitions, locating post-club melancholia long before The xx and James Blake. Having smartly noted the rhythmic sympathies between their more Latin-influenced pop moments and the capital’s drum’n’bass scene, the pair synthesized this graceful move into a brave new electronic world. The title track and Single keep a close hold on their downbeat lyrical core values, though, and Thorn’s voice still catches against the barbed beats. Already famously grown up, here Watt and Thorn did a different kind of evolving, a creatively sure step in an unsteady adult world.