19th November 1992

NOT so long ago everyone at Melody Maker queued up to write gushing cover stories on All About Eve and they won reader's polls galore. Now their (new) record company, keen to make an effort, have to nag the likes of me out of retirement because the young cubs of today have taken as read the "goth-folk-whimsy" tags, and prefer to expend their energies promoting such worthies as Cornershop, Come and the Cranberries. Ironic, this. All About Eve are taking huge risks, changing shape and sound, leaping from Rossetti to Rauschenberg with intelligence and no mean fury. In the process they may alienate their previous hairy hippy following. Hurrah. Several grumble as they leave, pinning for the old hits, the family favourites. But it's a sharp, realised set, the new album held forth like the head of John The Baptist, grinning wildly. Only "Every Angel" and a radical staccato of "In The Clouds" placate the memory banks.

She knows how to sling a guitar. At times the Eves rock like a bitch!

The passion of the new Eve encompasses washes of phased guitar and lashes of melodic mystique. "Freeze" is the perfect poised, literate and evocative, while the cumulative effect of "Mine", "Infrared", and the inevitably great "Things He Told Her" is something like the second side of "Abbey Road" crossed by Sonic Youth after too many ice lollies. Whereas the imagery once have lapsed into the twee or the Tolkien, it's now more taut and tactile. Julianne Regan would be annoyed at Curve references but her new image is, if not Johnny Halliday, at least the front person of Texas was less karaoke, more wasted-cool. She knows how to sling a guitar. At times the Eves rock like a bitch!

There's a surprising seismic encore of "See Emily Play". I decide I LIKE good tunes with good words well performed. Such classicism will doubtless herald my final expulsion from the grey sexless indie ghetto, but should see All About Eve fall about undeaf ears all winter.

Melody Maker

HARRY WINTER
New Musical Express
14 November 1992