104 - Love and Its Opposite - Tracey Thorn 2010
Tracey Thorn has one of my favourite voices in music and in the last 3/4 years has made a couple of solo lps that you feel if she was starting her career would give her a profile up their with the best of the current deluge of female singer songwriters.
Love and Opposites is a proper gown up lp .With themes that only really resonate if you've lived a bit of a life. Not in terms of the life of a rock and roll star but the mundane world of bringing up children , waking up middle aged, marriage breakdowns and having to find love again. It is one of the few lps I know that feels like it was made specifically for the 40+ of us.
The sound she has found takes the best of the acoustic EBTG and the textures of the more dance EBTG all complimenting a voice that sounds better than ever.
As ever the lyrics are sharp , showcased in the opening track about the cycle of friends divorces
It is a slow paced lp but she does pick it up for a song that sung by a mother to her daughter
Hormones - Tracey Thorn
There are a couple of unusual covers but they fit in so well without the writing credits you probably wouldn't spot them.
Finally I think the whole LP can be summed up by this next track , recorded at home it also features Ben Watt and so makes you wish for another EBTG lp
You can buy Love and Its Opposite here
Tracey has also released a Christmas lp (although more a winter themed lp) of mostly covers which you can get here