Tracey Thorn
Love and Its Opposite
(Merge Records)

As their 1992 acoustic album made abundantly clear, the heart of Everything But The Girl was that of a folk band, but amplified. That wasn’t always obvious, though; throughout the ’90s they were filed under some inappropriate amalgam of electronic pop and trip hop, and even “Missing,” their career-making calling card international hit, is best known not with its original acoustic guitars, but via producer
Todd Terry’s booty-bass club remix (and then by proxy through Chris Kattan’s lascivious gyrations as Mango on Saturday Night Live, but
that’s another matter entirely).

So a singer-songwriter album from leading lady Tracey Thorn is an intriguing prospect, especially in the wake of her stellar 2007 solo rebirth, Out Of The Woods, a seductive Supermarket Sweep binge of vocal layers and keyboard lines in the Imogen Heap template. Love And Its Opposite is much sparser; not folk per se, just closer to it than fans of either her last band or her last album could have expected.

But it’s been decades since Everything But The Girl decided to start
trading in songs for beats, so rather than talking here about how
Thorn is now “wearing a different hat,” I’d like to propose a sister
metaphor which instead substitutes pants, the reason being that if you
hang up your pants for twenty years, you may find when you finally
pull them back down that they no longer fit properly. This is the
situation in which Thorn finds herself now.

In other words, even if they’re not bad songs, this barebones thing is
really just a needless waste of everybody’s time considering that she
could instead be doing the sculpting she already excels with. But then
there’s “Kentish Town,” a haunting Gothic guided tour through somebody
else’s memory lane filled with fog and regrets, breathtaking and
bone-chilling and yet perhaps the skimpiest of the bunch, enough to
make me defer final appraisals until we’ve seen the next round.
In the meantime, somebody please remix these.

Massive Attack
Heligoland
(Virgin)

Let’s start by going out on a limb here and pointing out the amusing parallels between the formula behind Massive Attack’s pioneering trip-hop and some of the briefly more marketable 90s electronic pop clowns like C+C Music Factory and the Real McCoy—specifically, the Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of Robert Del Naja’s mumbled back-alley baritone pseudo-raps and the somewhat more melodic leads, all with keyboard-laden backdrops hinting at fairly inept visions of the future. Remember that all of the above, roughly speaking, were contemporaries of movies like Hackers and The Net, artifacts from an awkward digital puberty where you’d get only one button on a mouse, if you even knew what one was in the first place.

Flashing forward 15 or so years, insofar as Heligoland still tries to be a Massive Attack record, the results are remarkable: “Rush Minute” and “Atlas Air” can stand alongside anything else this band has ever released. But those are also the only two fronted by Del Naja, and when he gives the keys to the van to guest lead vocalists like Tunde Adebimpe and Damon Albarn, it all falls apart. Neither is prepared to carry his band’s legacy for even four minutes—the foreboding songs are usually made even more upsetting by all the confusing amorphous edges, for one thing, but these guys just enunciate too damn clearly.

This is not a new approach, of course—the hired guns have previously given us killer songs like “A Prayer For England” and the immortal “Teardrop,” and even though Heligoland hits more than it misses, the upsetting part is that it feels for the first time like Massive Attack is standing on the edge of a precipice, ready to tie their lines to performances by outside artists and recklessly hurl themselves over into a simple rubber-stamping role. For all that morose soothsaying about the bleak Blade Runner existence bearing down on us, and all the effort they expended laying a foundation from which to address it, it seems that their own future didn’t quite shape up as expected. Maybe that wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it’s certainly one of those things that make you go hmmm.

My Brightest Diamond
Shark Remixes
(Asthmatic Kitty)

Let’s give the onetime Sufjan backup singer Shara Worden a freebie on the “Did we really need this?” question in reference to the sprawling new remix collection she’s built to accompany A Thousand Shark’s Teeth, and instead jump directly to how it actually fares. While the 2007 remix album Tear It Down (13 tracks) built from her debut Bring Me The Workhorse (11 tracks) was farmed out one song at a time, her sophomore album (11 tracks) turns into Shark Remixes (22 tracks), a set of four EPs, each driven by a different remix artist.

The big winner is bleeding-edge composer Son Lux, who handily flips the second installment upside down largely by placing digital drums and chirps alongside perversely overeager pseudoclassical instrumentation, vaguely in the template of Björk’s remarkable unhinged-camp Sinatra-shrieker “It’s Oh So Quiet.” (He reportedly didn’t actually listen to the full songs he was remixing until he had finished his new versions, which seems to have worked out surprisingly well.) Bringing up the rear is Roberto Carlos Lange of Brooklyn tropic-rockers Helado Negro, who peaks with a glistening take on “If I Were A Queen” (itself nonetheless outdone in solitary snowstorm misery by entries from Alfred Brown and DM Stith), and somehow manages to bungle his “Manzanas” even though its source material, “Apples,” was easily the most jigsaw-friendly piece on the original record.

But the songs were all pretty cooperative in that regard, which is probably why in the end this is worth sifting through, if not quite listening to wholesale. Thirty-three shark’s teeth down, 967 to go; just, come on, show a little restraint, guys—the solution isn’t always getting a bigger boat. In any case, the only person I want driving this one is Shara. Everyone else please get the hell out the way.

Final Fantasy
Heartland
(Domino Records)

Slated to be Owen Pallett’s final record under the Final Fantasy moniker he first used to break through a few years back, Heartland reveals the Toronto composer as a bit of a musical claustrophobe, which of course we should probably have already concluded, since he’s a violinist who now makes electronic records—a touch twee, even, but without the ukulele or whatever it is those guys are into these days.

But that’s the very real success of Heartland—it’s neither a spacey textural exploration nor a hummable pop record, but rather both. Just when you’re lost in an intricate waterfall of arpeggios or perhaps bopping your head involuntarily as a killer new drum pattern enters, Pallett will hit with you with a clever lyric or a memorable hook or something else that just shouldn’t be there, not according to the standard blueprints anyway.

Foremost among these would be the refrain from sort-of title track “Oh Heartland, Up Yours!”—actually less amusing in execution than the punctuation might make it seem on paper, instead coming across as a tender Sufjan project gone awry, perhaps lamenting the various cruelties of 50 women instead of celebrating their home states—and perhaps also the sophisticated rhythmic programming on “The Great Elsewhere,” which disguises a lovely soaring melodic curve, but only very poorly, like those sunglasses with the built-in mustaches. There are plenty of strings too, of course, lending a distinguished chamber-pop air to the whole affair which, quite frankly, isn’t needed, because a fine chorus is already pretty damn respectable.