Review Summary: Now you're looking over your shoulder
As Everything But the Girl, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt were reluctant pop royalty, their stretch of albums from 1984 to 1999 running a potentially unrivalled gamut from bossa nova to jazz pop, sophisti-pop, folk pop, downtempo, deep house and the occasional flirtation with liquid drum and & bass. Their versatility was anything but hollow: Thorn’s rich tone and disarming knack for emotional sensitivity (heard also on Massive Attack’s “Protection”) earned her a reputation as one of the UK’s most evocative vocalists, while Watt’s production and multi-instrumental acrobatics gave the duo a passport to the choicest contemporary stylings without so much as a whiff of the inexpertise that might have relegated similar acts to mere trend-hoppers. Uncomfortable with their level of fame and the demands the touring circuit made on the family they began together in the late ‘90s, the duo broke up the band in 2000 and diverted their talents towards other artistic avenues for twenty-two years - but skip to the present, and their pandemic-prompted comeback
Fuse has been afforded a hero’s welcome by practically every arm of the British press.
Quite right, too! This reception scans as an extended gesture of affection to their back-catalogue and legacy, a well-merited celebration of two widely loved masters of their craft.
Fuse itself does much to substantiate this: the pair still
sound like they’re at the top of their game, in part because they never truly left. Thorn’s voice has been widely heralded for its deeper, huskier tone courtesy of two decades’ worth of maturation and a fruitful solo career, while Watt’s corresponding work as a DJ and boss of deep house label Buzzin’ Fly translates into a set of tracks every bit as perfectly tailored to the Sound of 2023 as
Temperamental’s was to 1999. While some tracks revolve around piano arrangements, the bulk of this record is bang in line with his late ‘90s mission to afford pop music an authentic dancefloor sensibility: the superficial trappings of “Caution to the Wind” and “No One Knows We’re Dancing” may seem crafted to seduce those enamoured with contemporary synthpop, but this is pop-for-house-fans every bit as much as it is house-for-pop-fans. The fabric of this record, in its performance, its dressing, its
voice, is exquisitely constructed and vindicates almost every one of the compliments thrown its way.
If only we could leave things there. Alas - despite its many affirming qualities,
Fuse doesn’t command anything like the same gravity of the duo’s heyday records. Its songwriting, while never short of basic competence, unfolds in a series of ideas that simply proceed-and-end rather than sink their claws into the hooks that count and carry them away to the extent they deserve. The album’s 35-minute runtime is an unfortunate casualty of this, and there’s a slight sense of the band short-changing themselves with their newly spartan approach to writing. Perhaps there’s something endearingly tentative to this, a lingering question of
does this still work? accompanied by a reticence to overdo just about anything. The fruit of this is more underwhelming than it has any right to be: “Time and Time Again” in particular boasts a cogent narrative and tasteful hooks that are
almost strong enough to carry the song in the absence of the table-flipping bridge it so desperately calls for - the song never puts a foot wrong but is tantalisingly short of enduring greatness. “Forever” suffers a similar fate, too shy of extravagance to strike a good song from the flint of a good verse and the steel of a good chorus alone, while “Lost” and “Interior Space”’s downbeat musings are engaging but far underdeveloped. Forget the album runtime - most of these individual songs end with only the briefest of glimpses of what their ‘it’ factor might have been.
Still,
Fuse is hardly an unflattering show of pop nous if you reduce it to highlights: “Run a Red Light” is a strong showcase for Thorn’s voice that could comfortably trade places with any of
Temperamental’s downtempo ballads, while “No One Knows We’re Dancing” is a simply fantastic piece of storytelling that rides easily the most momentous progression on the album to tremendous effect. These songs are arresting, heartsome and meticulously realised, but far too economically paced to land the kind of knockout value needed to carry the record as a whole. And so it is that
Fuse lands as a welcome sampler of the Everything But the Girl sound updated to the ‘20s, but not quite the powerhouse comeback they are so clearly capable of.
