Rocktrospectiva: The Outstanding "Walking Wounded" Turns 30

Released on 6 May 1996 "Walking Wounded" was the 9th., studio album by the English musical duo Everything but the Girl. The album saw the duo adopting a more electronica-based style, following the success of the remixed version of "Missing" from their previous album, Amplified Heart (1994).

Four tracks from the album were released as singles, including the drum and bass-influenced "Walking Wounded" and the house-influenced "Wrong", which became top ten hits on the UK Singles Chart, as well as the downtempo track "Single", which set Tracey Thorn's emotionally direct vocal against breakbeats, organ and strings, and "Before Today". 

Walking Wounded drews on downtempo, drum and bass, and trip hop music, "compressing the wide open space of those then-nascent sounds into a pop format" and marked a change in the duo's approach to writing songs. Ben Watt produced various instrumental tracks, while Tracey Thorn wrote lyrics after listening to the completed tracks. In producing the tracks, Watt utilised samples from "unusual" sources; the song "Single", for instance, sampled Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" and Stan Tracey's "Starless and Bible Black". Thorn later recalled: "We really believed in ourselves and that comes across in the sound. We'd finally got to the point where we realised what our strength was: the softness and warmth of my voice against urban beats; the warm and cold, the soft and hard contrast. We got it perfect on this record; it was our pop triumph."

Critics hailed the fusion of electronic and pop styles on Walking Wounded as "groundbreaking" and "at once abstract and immediate, untamed and accessible", while also crediting the "psychological resonance" of the lyrics for "putting EBTG way above the campiness of most neo-lounge acts."  others uncommon in pop music, and that Everything but the Girl's balancing of "tradition and experimentation" and "softness and bite" made Walking Wounded "more interesting" than the purely instrumental work of the duo's collaborators.

 

Walking Wounded Track List:

 

1. Before Today

2. Wrong

3. Single

4. The Heart Remains A Child

5. Walking Wounded

6. Flipside

7. Big Deal

8. Mirrorball

9. Good Cop Bad Cop

10. Wrong (Todd Terry remix)

11. Walking Wounded (Omni Trio Remix)