Everything about Tracey Thorn’s latest offering Love and Its Opposite suggests ‘breakup album’. Divorce album, even. But no. Thorn’s partnership with Everything But The Girl collaborator Luke Watts continues on its apparently happy path, and we jump to the next conclusion that Thorn is playing a part.

Her character shifts across the album as a blanket covering a restless sleeper. She is by turns resigned and sad, passive aggressive and pensive, brooding and maternal, secretive and candid. Love and Its Opposite sees Thorn exploring all manner of middle-aged relationship realities. Her teenage daughter wears short skirts now and a happy ending is probably not waiting at the end of the bar.

Thorn combines some of the most charming aspects of Joan As Policewoman, Regina Spektor and Aimee Mann. Like Mann, Thorn’s voice can wear thin as the driving force on the album. Ewan Pearson’s production sounds inviting but stiff, over-polished in parts, and doesn’t always fit the material. Her voice is sometimes smoky and sometimes sentimental, but Thorn rests on her laurels and the result is a fairly flat dynamic.

She explores otherworldly abandonment in Lee Hazelwood’s Come On Home To Me with Swedish pop anti-hero Jens Lekman, while the laboured narrative in "Long White Dress" undermines the radiance of its instrumentation. "Kentish Town" is a solemn, ticking-of-the-clocks affair that feels somehow trapped in Madonna’s ‘Frozen’ video. You know the one.

Where 2007’s Out of the Woods took us out for a night on the town, Love and Its Opposite has us perched next to a careworn Thorn on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, saying farewell to youthful naivety and the dreams young girls dream. It speaks of compromise, of sacrifice, of being trapped like a rabbit in reality’s fluorescent gaze. It feels like a hangover record, surveying the damage of a likely misspent youth.

This is not Thorn’s folk album despite being described as such. Rather, it's a moody pop album about the illusions (and disillusions) of a childhood spent preparing for a happily-ever-after.

Review Score: 7/10