Everything but the girl – Fuse. 2023.

Review of the band's 11th album

Everything but the girl – Fuse. 2023.

Once you get past the ghastly cover which must have been regretted moments after it left for the printers this is a most welcome return for Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn, the married duo whose folk beginnings took the road less travelled via drum and bass and deep house.

Fresh from Thorn’s appearing on Massive Attack’s second album Protection the band avoided from morphed into coffee-table insignificance when Todd Terry remixed Missing in five hours apparently. Well, the five hours diverted an average torch song into the stratosphere and took the band with it. Missing was one of those songs still on the lips of any clubber returning from Ibiza and Italy in 1995 and soon the song owned the summer with the same entitlement as the weather.   

Fuse is the follow up to 1999’s Temperamental (was it THAT long ago?), and picks up a refined baton from that Lullaby to clubland, where they were once again in Suburbia, one a.m. / You're walking home again (Hatfield 1980). There’s a little less deep house this time, and flutters about more different genres than its predecessor.

Nothing left to lose mines their drum and bass rediscovery via 1996’s Walking Wounded as Tracey Thorn’s bruised vocal flickers over the breakbeats and warm electronica flutters: Tell me what to do / 'Cause nothing works without you. Well, we’ve all been there. It’s the sound of someone with nothing left, not even pride, as the bass line rattles the windows threatening to shatter them as effectively as any injured heart. For a married couple with celebrity mates there is a LOT of heartache in their world. The fragile Run a red light rests its head against the window of that night bus that seems disinterested in getting you home.  

Taking the lead from the Ewan Pearson produced electro solo album Record in 2018 the hypnotic perfection of Forever, and Caution to the wind pulsate with the joys of a carefree past (isn’t it always!) are laced with vocal effects that sink their claws into your heart to voice unheard emotions. It’s 90s house music with added 80s, which at the time was frowned upon, but is now a matter of course. Lost and Interior Space are a little slight in comparison, perhaps not fully flexing their potential from Watt’s sketchy improvised piano ballad demos recorded on his iPhone. They feel underwritten and too delicately produced; a barely heard snippet of conversation you’ll never hear concluded.  

The brisk synth riff of No one knows we’re Dancing murmurs with those accidental illicit late nights in the lounge, records scattered across the floor like a university bedsit while the kids sleep upstairs. It hums with the sort of complicity long-term couples reminisce about with a wry smile and a heavy heart.  

There’s a ground swell of not quite joy, or regret, but of the sort of reminiscing that requires another glug of booze that’s not forthcoming to land sweetly. There’s barely a track over four minutes, yet it pulls you in like an album twice its length. You miss it the moment it’s gone. A genuinely cracking album that sounds exactly as you’d hope.