Everything but the Girl
Walking Wounded

THE REVIEW

Sometimes you need pure decompression.

Songs made of air, just a whisper of wind, or rather of voice. A feeling like certain Brazil. Nuances, subtleties, something very delicate.

Tracey doesn't need to do much. She has a strange impersonal quality, there's no subject, just a kind of anonymous grace. A neutral tone that gently strokes.

And so you find yourself in an empty room that the soul fills as it pleases. With melancholy that is a kind of secret, a gentle mirror where you look by chance.

Electronic pop tinged with soul and jazz, a sprinkle of Massive Attack. "Protection," the most enveloping song in the world, recorded just a moment before.

Incredible subdued beauty, almost like "Eden," their first magical album...

...And that summer when the stars shone, the adults were at a party, and the kids at the fort with the stolen bottles. One of them spends the night with his best friend. They kiss, they "touch," they are together...

Once the stars vanish, the boy returns home. A woman shining like a diamond sleeps on the lawn, the boy peeks under her skirt, drinks a beer, smokes a cigarette, then thinks: "guys, this is life."

At home, a cigarette in the mustard jar and several bottles scattered around. The boy wanders from room to room, but strangely there's no one there.

"Years later - says Carver - I would still trade friends, love, starry skies for an empty house, with no people, no one to wait for, and all the drink one needs."

Fantastic, right? You would have said that the best part was what happened before.

And yet, the best part is the empty house. A place submerged in silence, I imagine. But if a record should ever play for you, well it would be this one...

Floating calmly away from the gaze of others...