If you've known Tracey Thorn over the last 20-odd years, you've known her as the maven, if not matriarch, of love-lorn electronic music. With Everything But the Girl, it seemed like her every long-held note wore away the ideal of the stable relationship-- ironic considering that Thorn ended up marrying her co-collaborator Ben Watt. Considering that she and Watt are on a presumably happy course, what with the marriage and the kids and all, Love and Its Opposite seems a unusual effort. The opening cut, "Oh, the Divorces!", says it all: With spare and folksly instrumentation behind her, Thorn pleads "Who's next? Who's next?" implying love's unfortunately serial nature. She's certainly playing a character here, but her resigned candor convincingly suggests that she's been burned enough to carry a record suspicious of love's charms.
Take the title. Thorn invites poetic discussion of what love's opposite actually is, and it sure as shit doesn't have to be hate or war. On "Long White Dress", Thorn suggests that romance does little but gunk up her head, and at this point it's better to settle. Love's opposite? Might as well be reality. Whether she herself believes it or not, the record all over laments the perfectionist disappointment of eluding true love. The curiously ham-fisted "Singles Bar" has Thorn's narrator just past her prime but still trying to fit into the Sexy Jeans, desperate to reel in a guy and the satisfaction to which she once felt entitled but somehow missed. The cliché "I wish you'd help me out of this mess/ I wish you'd help me out of this dress" sums up the shortsighted, long-in-the-tooth gal 20 years removed from the Everything But the Girl heyday.
Working once again with British producer Ewan Pearson, Thorn further dials down the synthesizer-based production that garnered her and Watt their greatest fame. 2007's Out of the Woods was a relatively low-key affair, but Love and Its Opposite plays more like a conventional singer-songwriter album. The shift in gears isn't unwelcome: Thorn, as always, exercises that smoky voice to great effect. It's not especially clear how much self-aware Thorn's hammy singer-songwriter character is, because if you don't suspend a bit of disbelief, then "Singles Bar" and "You Are a Lover" seem more a stilted narration of an unhappily independent woman inhabiting Lilith Fair's second stage. It's nice to think, however, that Thorn's earnest, middle-aged concept album, saddled as it is with its middle-of-the-road folksiness, illustrates that it's not all about love vs. hate, but the truly adult idea of still caring vs. no longer giving a shit.
