Released: 2023
Reunions are never quite what people think they’re going to be. In the two decades plus since Everything But The Girl had effectively become Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, the interested public had got to know them much better, particularly through Thorn’s down to earth, self effacing and confessional writing. Watt’s illness and a phobia of live performance amongst many other factors had left their work as a duo largely in suspended animation, a state which until the pandemic they were mutually happy to leave it in.
Circumstances were to change that, as Watt’s pandemic lock down regime presented a stricter right angle towards society. Eventually after second guessing the outcomes he relented, and the fragmental sketches he’d worked on would in part become Fuse, their first album in 24 years.
It’s lead off single was everything contemporarily pushed and pulled by a wobbling, twenty first century sub bass, but Nothing Left To Lose felt like an amalgam of the characters from both Missing and Walking Wounded, the long lost found, the casualties still alive but permanently marked. As a reunion Fuse coaxed the engine back into life, the humanity and sense of connection that so many had felt was lost it’s values. It wasn’t what some would’ve predicted. But then who wants to be trapped in expectations that are a quarter of a century old.
The Voice Of Unreason 