About

The British duo’s career appeared dead in the water when Todd Terry’s club remix of “Missing,” the lead single from their 1994 album Amplified Heart, swept across American dancefloors, eventually carrying the song to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100—their first U.S. top 10 single—and paving the way for their reinvention as trip-hop/drum’n’bass fusionists on 1996’s Walking Wounded, the most successful album of their career. No one expected Terry’s remix to take off the way it did—certainly not Everything But the Girl’s UK label, Blanco y Negro, which had summarily dropped them a few months before.

Worldwide came out in September 1991; a few months later, Watt’s health mysteriously began worsening. He was hospitalized for weeks, wasting away; doctors scratched their heads. Finally, they put him in a coma, opened him up, and discovered a rare disease, Churg-Strauss syndrome, ravaging his insides. Several times, he almost died. It’s not hard to detect signs of the experience carved into Amplified Heart. Written and recorded in the year following Watt’s recovery, the album presents a rare mix of austerity and optimism, fragility and determination.

Across the record, virtually all of the fluff of their previous album—twinkling digital keys, flugelhorn and soprano-sax solos, reverb plusher than the seats of a luxury SUV—has been banished. The duo’s newfound minimalism came in part from Massive Attack, who, in the summer of 1993, had sent Thorn a cassette of demos for their second album and asked her to sing on them. But where the resulting “Protection” was foggy, skunky, stoned, Everything But the Girl’s approach to reduction sparkles. Pared down to guitar, standup bass, drum kit, and the occasional programmed beat, Amplified Heart champions the virtues of economy without sacrificing any of the group’s habitual luster. There are few elements in play, but every one sounds like a million bucks. And by rubbing away the generic sheen of high-end production that smothered Worldwide, the duo’s music breathes anew.

Far beyond the impact of Todd Terry’s remix, the sound of “Missing,” and that of Amplified Heart in general, has resonated widely. Its careful strain of folktronica set the precedent for Beth Orton’s Trailer Park two years later, and then a whole raft of tuneful, trip-hop-adjacent sounds. Fifteen years after the album’s release, its gauzy mix of guitars and drums resurfaced on the xx’s debut album. And Everything But the Girl themselves turned out to have the world ahead of them: two more albums as a duo, three children, parallel solo careers, and several acclaimed memoirs. The narrative around them is of a group rescued from the brink; it’s one of pop music’s great comeback stories. But the genius of Amplified Heart is that none of that was foreordained. Here, all you can hear is relief at being alive, and the hunger to hang on a little longer.

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Label: Buzzin' Fly Records – EBTG009V
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue
Country: USA & Europe
Reissued: 2019 / Original Release: 
Genre: Pop
Style: Indie Pop

File under: Alternative / Indie / Pop
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