Tracey Thorn Out Of The Woods by: Arjun S. Ravi Mon:23-Apr-07 Label: Astralwerks Year: 2007 WB rating 31 out of 100

Twenty-five years changes a person. One may decide to marry, have a few kids, and if you’re Tracey Thorn, pursue an intriguing career at the height of house music’s popularity and collaborate with everyone from The Style Council to Working Week. Unfortunately for Thorn, 25 years has also meant an overdose of Gloria Estefan and a feverish addiction to synthesizer and processed beats.

The last Everything But The Girl album, 1999’s Temperamental, saw Thorn and hubby Ben Watt extend their dance-pop catalogue with a record that cemented them as ‘culture-house’ darlings. However, given their indefinite hiatus following Thorn’s extended maternity leave and Watt’s own DJ-ing engagements, it was getting clearer that the creative gears in Thorn’s head were turning, especially after the ‘Damage’ was done with Tiefschwarz.

On Out Of The Woods we meet a Tracey Thorn who has been through a lot but is decidedly detached from her personal life in a very unimaginative, looking-glass sort of way. Sure, they’re songs about relationships and love and the usual mushy stuff you find with any 45-year-old looking for a solo comeback, but just like her more mainstream colleagues (read Cher, Kylie Minogue, you get the drift) her music sounds heavily produced and blatantly unnatural. Even her song titles (‘Raise The Roof’, ‘Hands Up To The Ceiling’) seem particularly unflattering for someone you’d think wouldn’t come up with lyrics like “I get excited/You get excited/Why should you fight it”.

If first impressions were to last, the opener ‘Here It Comes Again’ would have you believe that this is actually a record worth listening to… more than once. With a melody that one could use for a Christmas carol and a charming string section, this song is by far the best of the record. Thorn’s vocals are bare and open, confronting the listener with a chicken soup for the soul story that finishes too soon. From then on, the album plunges into an irreversible, flaming, downward spiral. Given the strength of the first track, the rest of the album literally comes as a shocker. There is an overbearing generic sound that hits you and you can’t help wondering whether all she did was superimpose her voice on a bunch of Celine Dion outtakes.

Tracks two to 11 play out like an extended tribute to ‘80’s hair-pop, relying heavily on processed beats, keyboard flanger effects, and lyrics that were definitely the output of a night of heavy drinking with Paula Abdul, Whigfield and Mothers Heaven era Texas. On ‘A-Z’ (pronounced ‘A to Zed’, ‘cos she’s English) she borrows liberally from Sade, at times even sounding like her. Chock full of cheesy organ effects and loud bass the song is numbingly depressing and you can almost hear the ‘thud’ of the fallen quality bar. Essentially, we’re listening to an album that’s meant for eager 40-year-olds who miss the “glory days” and are looking to get their boogie on. But sadly they don’t have the time or the hair to do it, what with inflation and Volvo maintenance.

It’s this sort of middle-aged, middle-class vibe that is the defining element of the majority of Woods. It gets clearer as we move along to ‘It’s All True’, where if you close your eyes you can actually picture 50 17-year-olds dancing along a swimming pool on MTV Grind. Replete with that trumpet-y keyboard sound and vocals as exciting as Kylie Minogue’s dancing in the ‘Locomotion’ video, Thorn stamps her claim on the title of ‘Most British Sounding Gloria Estefan’.

The post-disco mood doesn’t let up; in fact, its vigour intensifies on tracks like ‘Get Around To It’ and ‘Grand Canyon’. But where someone like Madonna still manages to seem relevant and exciting, Thorn flails in the pool of a beatbox junkie’s nightmare. A lot of this has to do with her singing which is nothing like her EBTG days. There isn’t the early melancholic flair that we saw on A Distant Shore and neither is there the spunk of her collaborations with Massive Attack and Lloyd Cole.

On Woods, Thorn seems tired to the point of almost being disinterested. Her voice lacks emotion and depth; disappearing in the heavy production and effects. It’s a pity that after 25 years she isn’t able to open up completely. In the process of trying to play it safe, Thorn has been unable to bring to the table the most important element of the record – herself.