Tracey Thorn: Love and its Opposite

Concerned, according to its author, with "real life after 40", the Everything but the Girl singer's third solo album is a rarity: a grown-up record that's never boring. Thorn surveys the ruins of lives that have gone awry in the most quotidian way. "The honeymoon, the wedding ring, the afternoon handovers by the swings," she declares on "Oh! the Divorces", a tale of separation and shared custody. So what might have been Cold Feet in album form is instead powerful and poignant, a thoroughly enjoyable skip through other people's misery.