“And I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain”.
As if anything could be more irrelevant than a gruesome two-some of love-birds from the University of Hull troubling us with their weedy acoustic sweet-nothings, surely the re-invented EBTG, with souped-up Ibiza synths/stringz ‘n’ drumz, is it.
Severe knuckle-wraps for the members of Massive Attack who instigated this resurrection and those who found it in anyway appropriate or acceptable. They looked back at the twee boater-toting duo in their matching stripy T-shirts, and in some stoned haze saw gold among the detritus of the album Idlewild. Don’t get me started. The music then, but even more, their mid-90s offerings are irredeemably poor, period. “Stepped off the train’blom.. blomm'”. Stop, my ears are bleeding.
But there’s another little problem with EBTG, isn’t there? Tragic Tracey Thorne and Ben Watt were hit by the ugly-stick at an early age. Ben a disconcerting hybrid of Culture Club’s Jon Moss + Matt Bianco’s hat-wearing blokey + Eastenders ‘naughty’ Nick Cotton. While Tracey, where else can I start but a cruel experiment in animal husbandry? Someone put a stop to those farmyard DNA labs, it’s not kind.
The follow-up to the stupendously bland “Missing” was called “Walking Wounded”, which could have been rather prophetic, had they continued their aural assault on me. They have since made themselves scarce, beyond Ben (t)Watt’s eminently avoidable Dee-Jaying slots. Good riddance.