RECORDINGS IN REVIEW
2017; Wiley; Volume: 105; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2017.0108
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
Resumo1 8 6 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W T I M O T H Y Y O U N G Criticism is an artful business. The writer plays the game of couching observations about a work of art, a play, film, book, piece of music, a restaurant, in a context of values: cultural, intellectual, historical, even moral. But all the reader really wants to know is: Is it any good? The tug-of-war between a neutral evaluation of the thing and a gut-level reaction (delight? disappointment? disgust?) provides the wondrous tension in reviews like this. Allow me to set aside two factors that give shape to critical reviews, the evasion of the first-person pronoun and the standard intellectualization of the critic’s point of view, so that I may praise two musicians – one of them a long-time love who has consistently brought me joy and the other a relatively new crush who, at a tender age, shows talent worth celebrating. The first object of devotion is Tracey Thorn, one of the great pop voices of the past forty years. As one-half of the group Everything but the Girl (EBTG), as a solo artist, and as a collaborator with an array of musicians, she has built a career that is at the same time mainstream and idiosyncratic. From her first two albums as a member of the Marine Girls in the early 1980s to her most recent decade’s worth of solo work, she has forged an aesthetic that pays 1 8 7 R close attention to many modes of popular music, but which leads her to make work that stands fulfillingly on its own. Her young forays into post-punk playfulness while attending Hull University have been documented in her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star (2013), one of the really enjoyable rock-and-roll autobiographies that – while short on manic tales of self-destruction – touches on subjects about which many of us are curious: What did it feel like to become famous? What do you do when you’re grocery shopping and your children suddenly realize that’s your voice coming out of the loudspeakers? Thorn’s story is also largely the story of Ben Watt, her musical and life partner, with whom she formed Everything but the Girl as a one-o√ project to record a Cole Porter song – a truly ‘‘punk’’ thing to do – in 1982. That single, a completely unironic cover of ‘‘Night and Day,’’ led to an album and, eventually, a massive career. Their debut LP, Eden, from 1984, showed the strengths of Thorn as a writer and vocalist and Watt as a multi-instrumentalist and arranger. The crucial fact of that album was how, comprised of ballads, jazz-inflected tunes, and laments, it held its own with the dizzy array of pop, New Wave, and power ballads that filled the airwaves in the mid-1980s. Though they are often categorized with acts such as Sade and the Style Council, EBTG were determined to carve their own path, despite sometimes wavering critical response. Their 1986 album, Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, was an unapologetic tribute to the Bacharach 1960s, expertly crafted and unlike anything else produced by a pair of twenty-somethings that year. Several smart, never less than entertaining and often surprising albums followed. Then, in 1995, EBTG blew up with a worldwide hit, ‘‘Missing.’’ They built on that success until 2000, when they went on hiatus, a status that remains in e√ect today. Tracey Thorn’s reemergence as a solo artist began in 2005 as a project with the house music duo Tiefschwarz: the single ‘‘Damage.’’ It was no surprise that Thorn’s voice was brought out of the silence through a collaboration. Some of her most interesting work can be heard in partnerships with innovative musicians. The most important of these is her work with Massive Attack on their 1994 album, Protection. Thorn composed the title song with the band, creating one of the signature sounds of the 1990s, ‘‘I’ll...
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