The story of these first four Everything But the Girl albums, newly reissued and bonus-stuffed, is largely about a young band searching for an identity to call its own. In the process they try on styles, old and new alike, to see which fit best. They make wild stylistic leaps from album to album with only Tracey Thorn's warm and wounded and utterly unflappable voice to provide a link between them. Do all of those change-ups work? Of course not. It'd be surprising if every move the young EBTG made did work. The road to the mature (and often very different) music that made EBTG global stars in the 1990s was unsurprisingly filled with the expected false-starts and dead-ends.
On the other hand, it's equally surprising how assured and sophisticated much of this music remains, along with being intermittently moving and sometimes just undeniably catchy, albeit in a very dated way. This was a duo with a history in the earliest days of ramshackle UK indie pop, the moment just after post-punk that prided itself on peppy primitivism and emotional vulnerability. But from EBTG's debut album, 1984's Eden, it was clear that a creative life built around cutesy C86 sloppiness didn't much interest Thorn or partner Ben Watt. This is indie pop after it's been sent to finishing school, and the album plays out as one bittersweet swoon.
There's plenty of breezy Brit guitar jangle on Eden, but even that's played as smooth as possible. Thorn's smoky, stately singing transformed what might have been twee and childlike songs into something weirdly world-weary and cosmopolitan. Watt proves himself an adept student of retro styles here, mostly by avoiding the hubris of imagining himself as a big-band leader, using jazz horns and politely shuffling Latin rhythms as unexpected bursts of color. The only time he really flubs is on "Crabwalk", a tight-assed reverential jazz instrumental that less recalls the cinematic cool of Gil Evans than soundtrack filler in a kitchen-sink melodrama. The bonus tracks are fittingly all of a piece with the rest of the album, but special shout to the proto-dream pop, complete with angelic multi-tracked backing murmurs, of "Easy as Sin".
The world EBTG created on Eden was so pleasant, even at its glummest, that you wanted to linger there a while. 1985's Love Not Money, however, was a near-total reinvention and a complete stylistic mish-mash. One on hand, guitars came coated with about nine pounds of agreeably dated glitz, like the gaudily anthemic college rock being peddled by bands like the Icicle Works. On the other hand, it's the most soporific and studiously "serious" album EBTG ever made, and parts of it are a real drag. The murky, cavernous stuff assumes that droning on depressively is the best way to handle weighty topics, and some of the new touches, like the Celtic kitsch of "Sean", with ultra-kitschy tin flute, are so ham-fisted you'll cringe.
Yet EBTG's blunt if heartfelt seriousness really could be affecting when married to the kind of blissful tunes they did so well. At its infrequent best, Love Not Money plays the dreaminess of 80s soft-focus indie against the stark Reagan/Thatcher reality that so much 80s pop was rushing to avoid. And there are hints throughout that they could have pulled off the dark stuff, too. Built around Thorn's show-stopping, soulful, slow-burn of a performance, "This Love (Not For Sale)" is as epic a torch song as EBTG would write until the 90s, where 80s quiet-storm signifiers (that saxophone) meet an almost Talk Talk level of attention to sonic detail. The bonus tracks are an equally mixed bag, ranging from a stripped-back piano backing track for another excellent Thorn showcase, "Charmless Callous Ways", to "Easy as Sin", another attempt at a radio-friendly indie anthem that never quite achieves lift-off.
By 1986, many of EBTG's old post-punk contemporaries had scored big by embracing 80s pop radio's monumental mix of canned funk and total schmaltz. At the same time, "adult contemporary" values of classiness, composure, and old-school glamor had taken over pop as a whole. The same year's Baby, the Stars Shine Bright was the EBTG that felt like it had completely divested itself of any remaining trappings of rock, punk or otherwise. Along with having the biggest hooks they'd come up with yet, Baby is also the best of these four albums because they really commit themselves to its faintly cheesy opulence, sweeping Nelson Riddle strings, and perfectly manicured horn charts.
After all, you can't sell a song with a title like "Don't Let the Teardrops Rust Your Shining Heart" by half-measures, and the music is as lush anything from the big-money era in which it was recorded, even if the lyrics betray a deep suspicion of the triumphal conservatism and creeping fascism that was the flipside to so much of the decade. Heard with 21st-century ears, what it most reminds me of is a very 1980s version of Matthew Herbert's forays into big-band jazz and film scores, right down to the mix of old-school sonics and current tech, love songs and political commentary. Aside from a few supper-club snoozers, Baby is full of great and almost-forgotten 80s pop gems like "Don't Leave Me Behind", every ultra-bright piece of which sounds unashamedly stuck in its moment and all the better for it. The bonus tracks tend to stick to supper-club mode, though there's an even more momentous extended mix of album opener "Come on Home", and a few curious home-recorded demos that suggest what a lo-fi take on 80s big-biz pop might have sounded like.
All that excess and drama was gone by the time of 1988's Idlewild. This is the album where, sadly, all of the band's poise and restraint often turns to blandness. At its weakest, it's as if the laid-back reveries of Eden had been given a personality-erasing clean-up, tender bits of indie small-town portraiture being power-washed with late-80s gloss. The album's uniformity means EBTG never embarrass themselves, but the production gives the even the most intimate songs slickness that verges on sterility. A shame, too, because the songs are some of the strongest EBTG had written thus far, pointing not so much to their later and more well-known work as the wise and reflective solo albums Thorn has made in the last decade. "Oxford Street", in particular, is a heartbreaking little private meditation on the passage of time and its effects on both the world and how one person perceives it. On the bonus cuts, the band indulges its intermittent country music jones, Thorn stretches out on more expansive tunes like the cover of Crazy Horse's "I Don't Want to Talk About It", and the home demos prove that recording outside of a studio in no way means a more handmade-sounding product.
These reissues sound great, especially on Eden, where the soft parts feel fuller and the edges more defined, without getting too sharp and digitally prickly. The other albums were often too sharp and digitally prickly to begin with, but they definitely seem brighter, which only fits the vibe. These albums are always fascinating from a historical perspective, as evidence to the curious ways pop aspirations affected indie bands in the 80s. They're also often quite strong on their own merits. And even their missteps charm when you consider that Watt and Thorn rode out the rocky times, believed in each other, found success, and built a partnership (musical and otherwise) that's outlasted and often outshined acts who made bold statements and arresting debuts, only to fizzle in pop's glare.
