Everything But the Girl in tier list
My first impression was quite positive; I was very inclined to like it, to find things to like about it. There was a weirdness, a vibe that I didn’t quite get, but that I wanted to get. In the first couple albums, some songs really hit, and that made me more excited to keep listening, to be able to hear in the other songs what I heard in the ones I liked. The songs that I didn’t like were often largely instrumental. Or, sometimes they weren’t, but they somehow managed to feel like they were. I don’t know how better to describe that—they weren’t instrumental, but they felt like they were. They were hard for me ears and brain to hold onto in the same way that instrumental stuff often is.
I enjoyed them more, felt like I was getting better at listening, up to about The Language of Life. I think that was the album I enjoyed the most, and then after that things stopped getting better. There was an odd feeling of the production and mixing and stuff becoming more consistently in line with my preferences even as the pacing of the songs and the songwriting became more mellow than I prefer. There was a moment where those things balanced out in Amplified Heart before they tipped out of balance and I just started losing interest, losing the motivation to try to enjoy the music.
I was bored by Walking Wounded. It slowed down a ton more, and had more of an electronic feeling I didn’t care for. It dragged on. Occasionally I almost felt like I got the vibe, but it would always slip away from me. I was thoroughly uninterested in Temperamental. I was displeased by Fuse, the album they made in 2023, 24 years after Temperamental. Fuse felt like it leaned hard into all the things I didn’t like about their previous stuff while leaning far away from everything I did like. It would slowly build elements throughout the song that I didn’t feel added to the song, didn’t change anything up. It felt slow and repetitive and bland. I tried to listen to it with good attention but it would slip out of my ears like water. Worse than water; water gets stuck in my ears all the time.
So. Promising start that never delivered what I was hoping it would, and in fact only got worse for me. I’m gonna give a low C-. It’s possible it’ll go up, if only because recency bias on the albums I didn’t like is telling me I like the band overall less than I actually do. For now, though, I think the C- fits.
Everything But the Girl complete, now listening to: Faith Hill
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