Amplified Heart (Bonus Track Version)

Though 1994’s Amplified Heart continued to develop the sound that Everything but the Girl had been honing for years—intensely quiet and acoustic-based, deeply infused with cocktail jazz and bossa nova—it deserved to be their breakthrough album for a few specific reasons. Where the band had always had a slightly chaste demeanor, this album expanded their underlying lust and storminess. The brooding and mystical influence of British folk-jazz guru John Martyn is felt immediately on “Rollercoaster” and continues through “I Don’t Understand Anything” and “Get Me,” songs that throb and sway even as they remain hushed. That sublimated lust was made explicit on Todd Terry’s remix of “Missing,” which was already an intense and insistent tune by EBTG standards. Terry’s skeletal club beat was a total departure from the austere acoustics of past EBTG albums, and yet it felt utterly appropriate, because it enhanced the feelings that had been brewing throughout the rest of the album. The remix turned the duo’s attention to electronic music, which was already used by Ben Watt, in masterfully understated fashion, for “Troubled Mind.”