渣译《Amplified Heart》Pitchfork乐评(8.6分）

“Though their 1994 album became most famous for a surprise hit remix, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s spare, pensive style never sounded more fully realized than here.”

“抛开他们1994年的专辑因混音而出人意料得出名不谈，Tracey Thorn和Ben Watt空余沉思的风格从未像现在这样充分地实现了。”

A phoenix rising from the ashes. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Pick a cliché we use to talk about resilience, and it can probably be applied to Everything But the Girl. 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.

一只从灰烬中飞出的凤凰。“杀不死你的让你更强。”随便选一句评价韧性的俗语都可以形容Everything But the Girl。当Todd Terry的俱乐部混音版"Missing"（1994年发行的专辑Amplified Heart的头支单曲）横扫美国的舞池之前，这对英国二重唱组合的事业似乎已经陷入一片死寂。最终这首混音在Billboard Hot 100榜单上爬到了第二名，这是他们在美国的第一首排名前十的单曲，这为他们1996年发行的回春专辑Walking Wounded（完美融合了trip-hop与drum’n’bass, 生涯最成功）铺好了道路。没有人能预想到Terry的混音所带来的成功。对Everything But the Girl在英国的厂牌来说，这更加让人惊讶，因为在几个月前该厂牌就和乐队解约了。

Today, it’s ironic to think that the duo’s biggest hit was right around the corner, and some suit just couldn’t hear it. But at the time, Everything But the Girl had been twisting in the wind for a while, and perhaps it’s understandable that major-label A&Rs didn’t see the record’s potential, couldn’t fathom that pop music’s pendulum was finally swinging back toward the duo’s spare, pensive style, which never sounded more fully realized than on Amplified Heart.

在今天看来，最具讽刺意味的是，这对组合最成功的Hit根本就唾手可得了，唱片公司却完全无视。但在当时，Everything But the Girl已经风中凌乱了一阵子了，主流厂牌A&R没有看到这张唱片的潜力 ，没能意识到流行音乐的偏好终于指向了这对组合空余沉思的风格（在Amplified Heart中听起来，这种风格从未这样充分地实现）也是可以理解的。

If Walking Wounded is remembered as Everything But the Girl’s miraculous, odds-beating comeback, Amplified Heart represents the first time they got a second chance. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt had been making music together, their creative partnership inextricable from their romantic one, since 1982. Not only had they outlasted virtually all of their post-punk contemporaries, but they’d put out six albums and traversed nearly as many musical styles: bossa nova, jazz, jangle pop, orchestral soul-pop, adult contemporary. By the time they released 1991’s Worldwide, a too-smooth-for-its-own-good record that was met with total indifference, they were running on fumes. “In many ways it was absolutely invisible,” Thorn wrote of the album (not “a dreadful record, just a not-good-enough record”) in her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen. They were an ’80s band with ’70s ideals, and the wan Worldwide suggested they just weren’t made for the new decade.

如果Walking Wounded被纪念为Everything But the Girl奇迹的打破困难的东山再起之作，Amplified Heart则代表了他们第一次获得第二次机会。Tracey Thorn和Ben Watt自1982年以来就一直在一起创作音乐。他们既是充满灵感的创作伙伴，也是一对恋人。他们不仅拥有比所有后朋克同期乐队更长的职业生涯，他们还在发行的六张专辑里尝试了尽可能多的音乐风格：bossa nova, jazz, jangle pop, orchestral soul-pop, adult contemporary。在1991年，他们发行了Worldwide —— 一张自以为会很顺利的专辑却遭到了市场的无视，乐队当时十分生气。Thorn在她的回忆录里写到“在很多方面，这张专辑都是不存在的。不是一张可怕的唱片，却是不够完美的”。他们是带着70年代理想的80年代乐队。Worldwide像是在告诉他们，在新的十年，他们是不会成功的。

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.

Worldwid发行于1991年九月，几个月后，Watt的健康神秘的开始变差。他住院了好几周消逝着生命，医生只能挠腮无能为力。最终，他陷入昏迷进行手术，确诊了一种罕见疾病Churg-Strauss综合征。他几次濒临死亡。不难在Amplified Heart中洞察到这个经历。这张专辑是在Watt康复后的第二年制作录制的，这张专辑展示了一种紧缩与乐观，脆弱与果断的罕见混合。

The very first notes of “Rollercoaster” signal a newfound sense of purpose: There’s an unusual eloquence to the call-and-response interplay between double bass and synth that opens the song. It’s not only a matter of tasteful restraint; Thorn and Watt had done that plenty of times before. Here, the way the two sounds twine around each other, gliding fretwork mirrored by the synthesizer’s G-funk legato, feels as perfect an expression of two lovers’ self-sufficiency as anything in their catalog.

“Rollercoaster”的第一个音符就表明一种新发现的目的感：开启这首歌的是低音提琴与合成器之间的互动带来的不同寻常的精彩。这并不仅仅是源于对品味的克制，Thorn和Watt在此之间做过很多次。在这里，合成器带来的匪帮放克让融合格外顺滑。两个声音彼此缠绕在一起的方式就像两个恋人的自给自足一样，完美地表达了他们想表达的任何东西。

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.

整张唱片几乎消除了他们在前一张唱片中犯下的所有小错误-忽闪忽现的电子节奏，粗管短号和高音萨克斯的独奏，比坐在豪华SUV里都更加夸张的混响。两人新发现的极简主义部分来自于Massive Attack，在1993年夏天，他曾向Thorn发送了一张第二张专辑的录音带，并请Thorn演唱。但他们一起合作的“Protection”太过于飘渺了。Everything But the Girl只留下了吉他，立式贝司，鼓套件和偶尔的程序性节拍，Amplified Heart捍卫了经济实惠的价值，而又没有牺牲乐队的惯常光泽。演奏中利用了非常少的元素，但每个元素听起来都像是百万美元。通过消除令Worldwide窒息的如高端产品的平庸光泽般的制作，二人的音乐有了新的呼吸。

So do their lyrics. (On earlier albums, Watt had let his partner handle the bulk of lyric writing; here, each contributed five songs.) Though Thorn had long excelled at nostalgic snapshots and finely drawn character studies, Amplified Heart moves in the opposite direction, boiling down universal sentiments—loneliness, longing, confusion—into simple, indelible images. A turbulent love rolls like a freight train through someone’s life; a depressed woman eats her meals in bed, watching Saturday-morning cartoons with the sound turned down.

他们的歌词也一样。（在较早的专辑中，Watt让他的搭档处理大部分的歌词创作；在这里，他们每人贡献了五首歌曲的作词。）尽管Thorn长期以来擅长于怀旧风格的速写和精细描绘的人物研究，但Amplified Heart却朝着相反的方向前进，将普遍的情感（孤独，渴望，困惑）融化为简单又不可磨灭的意象。动荡的爱情像货车一样滚动在某人的一生中；一个沮丧的女人在床上吃饭，调低了电视的声音，看着星期六早上的动画片。

Only a fool would try to map the inner life of this most private of couples onto their lyrics (for years, interviewers tried, and failed, to understand their domestic dynamic), but Amplified Heart excels at giving voice to the inevitable frustration of any long-term relationship—particularly the occasional, nagging doubt that you can never really know your partner. “Even though I share your bed/Baby, I don’t get inside your head,” Thorn laments on “I Don’t Understand Anything,” and a few songs later she pleads, “Do you ever get me?”—her voice catching on “get,” clicking like a key unlocking an empty room. Balancing out the doubt is “We Walk the Same Line,” a deceptively chipper song about hanging in for the long haul that’s built upon memories of Watt’s hospital ordeal. The two had been through hell, and though they were loath to reveal too much, they were happy to drop artful clues. (In “I Don’t Understand Anything,” Thorn even hinted at a frustrated desire to have children—terrain she finally revisited on her 2018 song “Babies.”)

只有傻瓜才会通过他们创作的歌词来窥探这对将私人生活保护得严丝合缝的恋人的内心世界（多年来，访问他们的人一直在尝试了解他们的家庭动态，却一直在失败），但是Amplified Heart出色在表达了任何长期关系不可避免的挫败感，尤其是偶尔出现的令人不安的怀疑：您永远无法真正认识自己的伴侣。Thorn在“I Don’t Understand Anything”这首歌中感叹“就算我们同睡一床/宝贝，我还是不懂你在想什么”。在几首歌后她又恳求道“你是否曾懂过我呢？”。当她的声音抓住“get”这个词时，听起来像是正用一把钥匙转动一间无人房间的锁时发出的咔咔声。平衡疑惑的是“We Walk the Same Line”，这是一首听起来似乎很欢快的歌曲，它讲述了在Watt住院时，为了建立信念所付出的长途跋涉。他们曾经历了地狱般的折磨，尽管他们不愿透露太多东西，但他们很乐意留下巧妙的线索。(在 “I Don’t Understand Anything”这首歌里， Thorn甚至暗示了她想要孩子的沮丧愿望—这在她2018年的歌曲“Babies”才终于得以重新审视。)

The album’s first side is the stronger, with a stellar three-song opening run (“Rollercoaster,” “Troubled Mind,” and “I Don’t Understand Anything”), a charming (if slightly cloying) he-said/she-said duet (“Walking to You”), and, finally, “Get Me,” an understated love song flecked with the faintest trace of house music. But the second half’s few failings—namely the jump from the maudlin “Two Star” to the perky “We Walk the Same Line”—are more than compensated for by “Missing.”

专辑的前一半更加出色一些，由三首主角般的出色单曲开场(“Rollercoaster”“Troubled Mind”和“I Don’t Understand Anything”)，一首迷人的（可能有些许腻歪）如男女对话般的二重唱(“Walking to You”)，然后终于出现了“Get Me”，一首低调的情歌，点缀着微弱到难以察觉的浩室音乐。但后一半有一些失败瞬间，包括从伤感的“Two Star”到活泼的“We Walk the Same Line”的突然跳跃。但这些失败则通过“Missing”得到了弥补。

What, 25 years later, is left to say about “Missing”? For a song that has largely been eclipsed by its most famous remix—and Todd Terry’s rework is a masterpiece—the original stands out in part for its quirks. The time-keeping cowbell is louder than you might have remembered it, and at first seems almost out of place; the first few notes of the bassline are dead ringers for the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Almost immediately, though, Thorn draws you into one of her typically detailed vignettes, as the song’s narrator steps off the train and stands beneath the window of a lover from years ago, long gone, maybe dead. The song’s chorus—“And I miss you/Like the deserts miss the rain”—shouldn’t work; on paper, it’s just a hair too much. But singing it, their voices twinned in close harmony, they sell it. Thorn’s voice, in particular, is the very incarnation of yearning. At regular intervals, an eerie, synthetic siren sound—a key element of the remix that gets its start in the original—drives home the hurt. In the face of such emotion, any corniness in the metaphor falls away. Of course it’s a desert, it had to have been rain—these things are elemental, fundamental, and so is the feeling the song captures.

在25年后的今天，我们对“Missing”还有什么要说的呢？对于一首在很大程度上因其著名混音而黯然失色的歌曲（Todd Terry的重做确实是杰作），其原本的版本在某种程度上因它的怪异编排而脱颖而出。计时的响铃声也许比你记忆中更加响亮，并且乍一听有些不合时宜。低音部的前几个音符像是The Human League的歌曲“Don’t You Want Me”的翻版。不过，Thorn几乎立即将你吸引到她的一个典型而详细的场景中：歌者走下火车，站在多年前情人的窗户下。太久之前了，她的情人也许都已经逝去了。这首歌的合唱，“我想念你/就像沙漠想念雨”，本是不应该吸引人的；把这句话写下来看，会觉得太土了。但是唱起来，两位歌手的声音融为一体，他们把这句土话成功唱到大家耳朵里了。尤其是Thorn的声音，是渴望的最佳化身。每隔一定的时长，有些令人毛骨悚然的合成警笛声（混音版本的一个关键元素在最初的版本中就有所体现）在驱赶心受伤的人回家。面对这样的情绪，在隐喻中的任何老套都会消失。这当然是一片沙漠，它也必须下雨，这些元素都是如此基础的，这也正是这首歌所抓住的感觉。

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.

“Missing”的声音，包括整张Amplified Heart唱片引起了广泛的共鸣，而这远远超过Todd Terry混音版本的影响。两年后，它小心应变的电子民谣风格为Beth Orton的专辑Trailer Park开创了先例，这之后又出现了许多优美的吹泡音乐（Trip hop）。专辑发行15年后，在xx的首张专辑中又重新出现了吉他和鼓的混搭风格。Everything But the Girl证明了他们领先了整个世界。在此之后，他们作为二重唱组合又发行了两张专辑，生了三个孩子，拥有了并行的个人音乐事业和几本颇受赞誉的回忆录。他们所讲述的是从悬崖边被抢救回来的人，这张专辑本事也是流行音乐史上动人的东山再起故事之一。而Amplified Heart真正天才之处在于，这一切都不是注定的。在这里，你能听到的全部是活着的欣喜与活下去的渴望。

原乐评 by Philip Sherburne