Everything But The Girl - Amplified Heart
Tracklist
Rollercoaster 3:13
Troubled Mind 3:33
I Don't Understand Anything 4:25
Walking To You 3:30
Get Me 3:33
Missing 4:05
Two Star 4:06
We Walk The Same Line 3:59
25th December 4:03
Disenchanted 2:04
Missing (Todd Terry Club Mix) 4:09
Year: 1994
I was first introduced to Everything But the Girls Amplified Heart by my first randomly met, pursued, asked out, and dated girlfriend. She had bought it for the Todd Terry dance remix of “Missing” that was getting lots of radio play at the time and she was not really sure what to make of the mostly sparse, decidedly non-club songs that made up the rest of the album. I did not pay too much attention to it, though, as we broke up soon after and I busily, dramatically, sought comfort in Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel of Love and Peter Gabriel - Us.
I started paying attention thanks to my senior year roommate. He took the album way too seriously, I was convinced at the time, and I tried to knock the wind out him by pointing out how adult-contemporary it all was and how Ben Watts double-tracked vocals sounded an awful lot like Andy Gibb. Plus, wasn’t “Missing” just a little too popular for the album to actually be any good? He stayed with it, though, playing the album on car trips and around the room and it soon became a constant companion.
As the soundtrack to a stormy senior year breakup—that is, a breakup that seemed to stretch out over an entire academic year—I found in it obscene amounts of relevance to my life. Lying on my dorm room floor in headphones I thought for sure that I knew what it was like to have a lover’s troubled mind be like “a goods train running through my life” or to look at someone and “only see bits of myself”. It didn’t seem to matter that these songs were built from experiences that I could only really pretend at; facing the loss of life to a rare and devastating illness and how to rebuild both your life and relationship in its aftermath (Watts book Patient is a stunningly vivid and personal account of his battle with Churg-Strauss syndrome).
Over the albums eleven tracks, Watt and Tracey Thorn march like Sherman over the minefields of their time together. You think that you have a handle on the pain and confusion and searching that this album is built around, but there’s little chance that many of us are as lived in as these souls. Commitment, illness, movie dates, holidays with your family, breakups, and the feeling of lying awake waiting for the phone pop up throughout and all along you never feel like the emotions couldn’t have been your own. The simple, heartbeat lyrics are never exclusive and the best of the melodies are so instantly familiar that they feel as if they were pulled from out of your memories. An essential part of what makes the album work is that it never leaves you on the outside looking in. When Thorns voice breaks, asking if her lover ever gets her, it brings down any walls that would separate her from the listener. (Jon Langmead/PopMatters)
AUDIOCHECKER v2.0 beta (build 457)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Path: ...\Amplified Heart
01 -=- 01. Rollercoaster.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
02 -=- 02. Troubled Mind.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
03 -=- 03. I Don't Understand Anything.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
04 -=- 04. Walking to You.flac -=- CDDA (99%)
05 -=- 05. Get Me.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
06 -=- 06. Missing.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
07 -=- 07. Two Star.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
08 -=- 08. We Walk the Same Line.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
09 -=- 09. 25th December.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
10 -=- 10. Disenchanted.flac -=- CDDA (100%)
11 -=- 11. Missing (Todd Terry club mix).flac -=- CDDA (100%)
Summary 99.91% CDDA
239568164
Audio
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec
Duration : 4mn 9s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 961 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 28.6 MiB (100%)
Writing library : libFLAC 1.3.1 (UTC 2014-11-25)
