Tracey Thorn Love and Its Opposite Album Review

With her latest release, Love and its Opposite (Merge Records, May 18), Tracey Thorn has opted to hang her aural portraiture in the most basic of frames allowing the soundscapes to speak for themselves. And what beautiful soundscapes they are.

In stark contrast to 2007's folktronica effort Out of the Woods, Thorn offers a non-apologetic 39 minutes of sparse ruminations on all things related to love, and well... its opposite.

Simply backed by acoustic guitar, piano, bass, drum, vocal harmonies and the occasional stylophone, the album's spare instrumentation provides a suitably blank canvas for Thorn's melancholy alto that hints of unadulterated yearning and memories and heartache.

The opening track, 'Oh the Divorces!,' is a wistful commentary on the coupling and subsequent uncoupling of close friends and family in a not-so-traditional boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl gets custody of the kids story. When the plaintive question "who's next, who's next?" glides over a treacly bed of violins, one can practically envision hundreds of prospective brides bolting from altars and running for the exits.

All is not doom and gloom however. Love and Its Opposite features ten tracks, eight originals plus covers of Lee Hazelwood's 'Come On Home To Me' with Jens Lekman sharing vocal duties, and 'You Are A Lover' by The Unbending Trees.

Produced by English remixer Ewan Pearson, the album deftly navigates what easily could have wallowed into dirge-like territory, utilizing the occasional electronic pings and drum machines to help maintain a pulse and speed things along.

In 'Hormones,' Thorn rocks prophetic about "growing up and letting go" of youth in a guitar-driven elegy that echoes the best of Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders 80's era output.

When the listener visits 'Kentish Town' and walks the old streets of a past not quite forgotten, you almost get the feeling that the track is thematically an indirect follow up to 1994's "Missing" with partner Ben Watt, the other half of the duo everything but the girl. While not even closely approaching a dance club anthem this time around, both songs similarly represent a chance to return, to go back and find the memory of a place better served than the actual return.

"Late in the Afternoon,' perhaps one of the albums strongest tracks, literally percolates with vocalized desire to keep the passion alive in a relationship that is nearing a winter of discontent. Thorn sings "every blemish, every scar, you know how they got there and where they are." Boredom breeds contempt or at least a great lyric it would seem.

Rounding out the album, 'Swimming' is the logical conclusion to all of this relationship Sturm und Drang. A mid-tempo track that uses water as the vehicle for release and escape, this upbeat closer gives a sense of freedom that transcends heartache and gives hope for a brighter future. The listener, much like the artist who has returned triumphantly to indie-status after 25 years and the freedom that entails, is the better for it.

Love and Its Opposite, indeed.