The factor about time is that it has no concern for the constants in our lives — they’ll finally fall away one after the other, similar to all the pieces else. It’s fascinating to listen to Beth Gibbons work over the grim certainty of this concept on her first solo report, not least due to the friction it creates along with her personal musical previous as vocalist with Portishead.
Because the Bristol band advanced, shifting on from the found-sound trip-hop of Dummy in the direction of their disorienting, abrasive comeback masterwork ‘Third’, she remained their emotional and stylistic anchor, providing introspective presence and melodies that felt like they existed outdoors of modes and developments, as if they’d been pulled from the earth.
On ‘Lives Outgrown’ Gibbons makes use of this historical past to her benefit. She cannily foregrounds the weather-beaten gravitas of her vocal at every flip, its familiarity holding us tight in order that, in parallel, she will be able to undercut that feeling of security by regularly declaring the grains of sand falling into the fallacious half of the hourglass.
In tandem with producers James Ford and Lee Harris, who additionally performed drums on ‘Out of Season’, her 2002 collaborative LP along with his former Speak Speak bandmate Rustin Man, Gibbons swaps out Portishead’s weighty electronics for a texturally adventurous and pleasingly odd acoustic palette. She falls in with crepuscular violins, incidental percussion and uneven, Björk-ish rhythms, pulling on conventional folks threads whereas jousting with Raven Bush’s strings, that are at turns orchestral of their sweep and designed to evoke the lonely creak of doorways that maybe ought to have stayed closed.
All through, Gibbons and her collaborators preserve a needling sense of unease that, when punctured, permits for fabulous melodic blowouts. ‘Reaching Out’ initially resembles a drunk on slick cobbles, its drums bucking and sliding, earlier than cohering into one thing nearly celebratory, whereas the spiralling hooks of ‘Past the Solar’ solely simply handle to maintain the observe’s core dissonance at bay.
These compositional about-faces match as much as lyrics that lurch from heavy to heavier as Gibbons displays upon grief and mortality in center age. “All going to nowhere,” she sings in the course of the lavish ‘Floating on a Second’. “All going, make no mistake.” She doesn’t present a simple out, as a substitute letting us marvel how way more pat carpe diem bilge we will abdomen. Within the course of, she subverts the roots of personal legacy with important new work that exists within the now as a result of it has to.
Particulars
- Launch date: Might 17, 2024
- Report label: Domino
