plorentz's Full Review: Touch (Deluxe Edition) [Digipak] by Eurythmics
She was a sleek black and white cat, silent and alternately attention-thirsty and vicious. When other people were in the house, she would slink up to our bedroom and insinuate herself between our sheets and bedspread without disturbing anything else in the room. We called her Gracie. She demanded respect from us, but seemed to expect abuse and neglect after years of being shoved aside at the food and water dishes by her older more outgoing brother George. She appeared to loathe him as much as she needed him.
When George died, she sat at the bottom of our stairs in the middle of night and howled soulfully, relentless and theatrical in her grief. Eventually, she decided she didn't want us anymore. For weeks, she perched herself on the third step up, unmoving. We'd come home to find her food untouched, and there she was, as vigilant, as watchful as a Medieval priestess. Silently reproachful. Martyring herself to our inadequacies as caretakers. After we finally gave her up, we heard from her new people that she was doing fine. Happy and relaxed and apparently satisfied with the way things had turned out.
When she still lived with us, we'd jokingly voice her thoughts as she made her entrance into a room and approached us: "I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you."
I'm reminded of Gracie listening to (and looking at) the third album by The Eurythmics, recently refurbished as part of Sony/BMG Legacy's lavish reissue of the band's discography. Released less than a year after the band became international stars with their classic "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)", the album is full of willful contradictions, emotionally (and sexually) wrought enticements that turn into vicious tongue-lashings. For instance, the album - whose cover is a portrait of lead singer Annie Lennox, wearing a black mask (and nothing else as far as we know) with arms flexed in a show of strength, one eye fixed on the camera: a dare - is called Touch. Touch me, it seems to say.
But a listen to "Aqua", the song from which the album takes its title - its cold, boiling synth bassline and weird wordless background vocals like witchy spells - and the harsh ambiguity of the record is clear:
Don't touch me! Don't talk to me about it.
Don't touch me! Don't talk to me! Ever again!
I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you.
- - - - -
The sudden success of the Eurythmics was entirely unintentional and probably struck many as a surprise; but perhaps no one more than Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart who after struggling for the better part of a decade in their previous group The Tourists as well as their earliest work as a duo. In fact, the group's breakthrough single and Annie's memorably hard vocal on it were very much a response to what felt like the increasing futility of their efforts as musicians. I traveled the world and the seven seas, everybody's looking for something.
Touch, then, reads as a direct and damn-near immediate response to their stardom - alternately joyous, confident, terrified, wistful, violent, cold, and goofy. The record has a truly schizophrenic quality to it that makes it feel disjointed and chaotic. Still, the record never feels unfocused; rather it focuses itself on the wildness and unpredictability of the duo's now public life (without necessarily being about that public life). It there's confusion to it, there's also a very vivid, colorful sense of liberation.
The album opens with what may be the group's most luscious single, "Here Comes The Rain Again", a song full of alluring mystery and drama, delivered in an intensely prayerful monotone, against a backdrop of pizzicato synths and live strings (conducted by Michael Kamen). There's a quiet yearning inherent in the lyrics - talk to me like lovers do - that seems to signify something unspoken, and suppressed. But as the song progresses, as the mantra of the chorus is repeated over and over - falling on my head like a new emotion - Annie's voice swoops and whirls around it in seizures of desperation, or something: Here it comes again! Here it comes again! Ah-haaah!
"Who's That Girl?" is equally dramatic, a foggy film noir in the form of a four-minute pop song. In its verses Annie sings a silky seduction - the language of love slips from my lover's tongue, cooler than ice cream - and then out of nowhere, a violent accusation: but there's just! one! thing!
That suspicious sensuality is manifest all over the album - especially in "Regrets" and "Aqua". And the elements of "Here Comes The Rain Again" are echoed in entirely new forms on "Cool Blue" and "No Fear, No Hate, No Pain (No Broken Hearts)", the former borrowing an ad-libbed line for the climax of its chorus, the latter recycling the deliberate, rhythmic synth-lines. But among these songs are tracks like the frenetic electro-funk disco of "The First Cut", the almost comically sunny Caribbean vibe of the album's third single "Right By Your Side", and the brittle eight minute exercise in robotica that closes the album, "Paint a Rumour", a masterful denial of all that is fleshy and human.
- - - - -
Like the other CDs in this magnificent (and long-awaited) batch of reissues, the deluxe edition of Touch restores the original album cover art on a glossy tri-fold digipak, adding a generous booklet with lots of beautiful period photos and historical notes by Phil Savidge all laid out by longtime Eurythmics associate Laurence Stevens; and augments the original album with a bounty of seven (seven!) super-cool bonus tracks.
Included are four b-sides - the wildly experimental (and mostly instrumental) "You Take Some Lentils and You Take Some Rice" and "ABC (Freeform)", a remix of "Regrets" (titled "Plus Something Else") and a "long version" of "Paint a Rumour". There's a live acoustic take on "Who's That Girl" dating from 1986 as well as an unreleased live version of "Here Comes The Rain Again" (featuring some very cool guitar work by Dave), and a previously unreleased (and probably ill-advised) cover of David Bowie's "Fame". All of which makes this Touch very very touch-able, even though it will cost you about the same price as a standard new release.
I love Touch. I loveTouch.
- - - - -
RATINGS:
Original album - 4 stars
Reissue - 5 stars
Total - 4 1/2 stars rounded up
- - - - -
BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Touch" [deluxe edition] by The Eurythmics
RCA / Legacy Records
Originally released 1983
Reissued 11/15/2005
Produced by Dave Stewart
Re-mastered by Ian Cooper
74 min.
SONGS: Here Comes the Rain Again - Regrets - Right By Your Side - Cool Blue - Who's That Girl - The First Cut - Aqua - No Fear, No Hate, No Pain (No Broken Hearts) - Paint a Rumour /BONUS: You Take Some Lentils and You Take Some Rice - ABC (Freeform) - Plus Something Else - Paint a Rumour (Long Version) - Who's That Girl? (live) - Here Comes the Rain Again (live) - Fame
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
![Touch (Deluxe Edition) [Digipak] by Eurythmics](http://di1.shopping.com/images1/pi/2a/b2/d3/2004559471-177x150-0-0.jpg)
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.