Editorial Reviews
Music Review:
Music Review
Music: Grotesque (After The...) +3 Rm
Amazon.com
Every now and then, a band releases a best-of album that makes the previously unimpressed see what they've been missing all along. On Like the Deserts Miss the Rain Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl have created a personal blend of big hits, obscure b-sides, album tracks, and remixes that amounts to the best record of their 20-year career. We may know that they began as lefty student bossa nova interpreters, grabbed unlikely success as Sade-for-bedsits with 1984's "Each and Every One" single and 1988's Idlewild album, and went successfully house and drum & bass with "Missing" and Walking Wounded in the mid-1990s. What we perhaps missed is how subtly and powerfully they've developed their style, how even the most MOR moments have contained some kind of edge--a vocal yearning here, a rhythmic muscularity there. Thorn's lyrics are a particular revelation--defiant, angry, funny and true--and her moving expression of sisterly love on "Protection" sounds more at home here than on the Massive Attack album of the same name. In short, this is a deep and entertaining pop record that shows exactly why they've survived and thrived for so long. --Garry Mulholland
Album Description
Full Title - Like The Deserts Miss The Rain. This collection stuffs a single CD with 16 tracks from albums and singles released between 1984-1999.