Walking Wounded

Walking Wounded is the ninth studio album by Everything but the Girl, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt. Virgin released it in Europe on 6 May 1996. Atlantic released it in the United States on 21 May. They recorded it in 1995 at Little Joey’s, Milo and Strongroom in London. It reached number 4 in Britain. The producers, beside Watt, include Spring Heel Jack, Howie B, Todd Terry and Rob Haigh. That list is a map. Spring Heel Jack and Haigh come from jungle and ambient techno. Howie B comes from the trip-hop side. Terry is the house producer whose remix of Missing, from the previous album Amplified Heart, had turned a sophisti-pop duo into a dancefloor fact.

Walking Wounded is the album that writes a whole record inside that fact instead of treating the remix as a lucky accident. Thorn’s voice does not become a sample to be chopped into someone else’s 12-inch. The drums come up to meet her. Before Today and Single are the songs where you hear the negotiation working: a verse that could have lived on one of their 1980s albums, a rhythm that could only have been programmed in the middle of the 1990s. The title track is the one the title deserves, a drum-and-bass tempo under a lyric about damage that refuses to shout. Watt producing alongside people who actually made those rhythms, rather than imitating them from a magazine, is why it does not sound like a style exercise.

A lot of bands in 1996 hired a dance remix and kept the album politely apart from it. Thorn and Watt did the ruder thing. They let the remix change the next record. Number 4 in Britain is the chart fact. The listening fact is Thorn, intact, on a rhythm section that Spring Heel Jack would have recognised as theirs and that a fan of Eden or Idlewild would have recognised as hers. Both recognitions are the album.

Sources

• Walking Wounded: Virgin, 6 May 1996; Atlantic, 21 May 1996; London studios; UK number 4; the producers.
• Discogs, Everything but the Girl — Walking Wounded, Virgin CDV2803, Europe, 6 May 1996.