“To sing is to pray twice,” said St Augustine. It’s a haunting line – perhaps celebrating the miracle of human hope over any expectation of divine attention– that Tracey Thorn quotes with aching resonance on Fuse, Everything But the Girl’s first album in 24 years. It’s an album that makes a church of its elegant electronica: all vaulting arcs of yearning melody and glimmers of stained glass that dance upwards, to the familiar urban spire of Thorn’s beautiful, hangdog voice.
“I’ve always been an atheist,” Thorn wrote in a column published in the third month of the pandemic. But, taking her daily walks around a London graveyard, she found her questions and her internal dialogue with her mother (who’d been dead for a decade) beginning to feel “a bit like prayers. How long, oh lord, how long?” Perhaps it’s strange to say, but EBTG have always had a kind of lockdown mood, in the way their music seems to freeze scenes of Britain like in a strange blue-lit suspension – like Damien Hirst’s shark. On hit single “Missing” (1994), they described heartbreak on a train; on “Walking Wounded” (1996), the heartbreak takes place on the bus. A quarter of a century later – on this abum’s biggest banger, “No-One Knows We’re Dancing”, Thorn is singing about a guy driving a Fiat Cinquecento and dryly recording the lifestyle of an EU lawyer. “He does London, Paris, Munich” she sings, like a sarky Sade.
