After pausing an 18-year career in the best-selling band, Everything But The Girl, Tracey Thorn re-emerged in 2007 to critical acclaim with the glittering folk-disco of Out of the Woods, her first solo album since 1982's A Distant Shore. Now she is back with another: the starkly beautiful Love and Its Opposite on Merge Records.

Love and Its Opposite is steeped in a compassionate directness. The tight, often undecorated arrangements for guitar, piano, bass, and drums (and a smattering of strings and woodwinds) serve ten songs over a compact thirty-nine minutes that confront the full unvarnished weight of complex relationships in flux.