Beginning with “The Ground Above” and closing with “Otherside”, there’s an ambient, otherwordly, disembodied feel to Beth Orton’s new album on Partisan Records, a follow-up to 2022’s self-produced Weather Alive, which had its own spectral, dreamlike airs. “The Ground Above” is voiced by one of those unsettled spirits that rise out of one the hoary old Murder Ballads, but here, Orton is disembodied “among the choirs of the gods”, “ecstatic as a mother’s love” and lusty too: “And you kissed me and I knew what I was for, And it wiped me out like chalk off of a board.”
Her voice is worn and cracked, but still carries emotional freight, and the music is dreamlike and multilayered – Orton’s Rhodes rolling out an underlay for Sam Beste’s piano, a plethora of guitars, trumpet and rhythm section. On her lyrical meditation on time and ageing, “Cigarette Curls”, its soulful, spare opening coralls an 11-piece band behemoth, including a stuttery, neck-wrung outro guitar solo from Portishead’s Adrian Utley, and a rack of horns, woodwinds and strings. Its easy, natural gait, punctuated by the simplest piano line, fits well with Orton’s voice. Likewise, “Celestial Light” runs on a fuel mix of spare bass, Synthex analog synths and a tick-tock rhythm that all bleed out into a tonal bed of sound, with flute and glass marimba adding rich notes to the mix.
“I’ll Miss You” is the set highlight; if the album divided between the twin forces of love and grief, this song balances them, without losing sight either of the weight of grief or the buoyancy of love. It’s a leavetaking song, but it’s complicated, too. Her vocal sits perfectly against the subtle, rolling tapestry of sounds, propelled by jazz bassist Tom Herbert, the lyric unravelling, in ribbons of vivid poetic imagery, between care, loss, emancipation and freedom.
“I’m working with the unconscious, something like lucid dreaming,” she says of her writing method across these songs, and it’s that sublunar lucidity that marks out The Ground Above, buoyed by the collective generosity of her musicians, their ensemble textures flowing as free as the imagery and her voice’s feral emotional energy, and it all piles up in the big closing track, “Otherside”. It’s rousing kind of epic that reflects not so much Orton’s inner self but the glaring fractures spreading across the real world that contain hers and our inner lives.
