release date: Sep. 24, 1991
format: cd
[album rate: 3 / 5] [3,22]
producer: Everything but the Girl
label: Blanco y Negro - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 3. "You Lift Me Up" - 4. "Talk to Me Like the Sea" - 5. "British Summertime" - 8. "One Place" - 9. "Politics Aside" - 12. "Love Is Strange"
6th studio album by Everything but the Girl is the first to be entirely produced by the duo. As with most of their releases they write 4-5 tracks together, and write a few on their own respectively. It seems they have learned from their American experience with The Language of Life from 1990 and taken much of the same production sound back to record this. It's not over-produced, which I sometimes felt the 1990 album was, it's lighter and also appears to have been recorded and mixed with lesser recorded tracks. And that suits their sound. They still make use of keyboards, synths and horn sections to create a spacial sound, but it has become more focused on the compositions alone.
As much as I think the sound has improved on this, I don't find that it contains any great tracks, and stays much on the same unfulfilled level, and it makes me wish they would put aside all the synths, keyboards, the reverbs and echoing effects and just record something lesser spacious like their great Love Not Money album. All in all, it betters their 1990 album but not with a large margin.
To me, EBTG is a great band that seems caught on the wrong foot in regards to what means to arrange their music.
[ allmusic.com 3 / 5 stars ]
