The thing about time is that it has no concern for the constants in our lives — they will eventually fall away one by one, just like everything else. It’s fascinating to hear Beth Gibbons work over the grim certainty of this idea on her first solo record, not least because of the friction it creates with her own musical past as vocalist with Portishead.
As the Bristol band evolved, moving on from the found-sound trip-hop of Dummy towards their disorienting, abrasive comeback masterwork ‘Third’, she remained their emotional and stylistic anchor, offering introspective presence and melodies that felt like they existed outside of modes and trends, as though they’d been pulled from the earth.
On ‘Lives Outgrown’ Gibbons uses this history to her advantage. She cannily foregrounds the weather-beaten gravitas of her vocal at each turn, its familiarity holding us tight so that, in parallel, she can undercut that feeling of safety by continually pointing out the grains of sand falling into the wrong half of the hourglass.
In tandem with producers James Ford and Lee Harris, who also played drums on ‘Out of Season’, her 2002 collaborative LP with his former Talk Talk 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 choppy, Björk-ish rhythms, pulling on traditional folk threads while jousting with Raven Bush’s strings, which are at turns orchestral in their sweep and designed to evoke the lonely creak of doors that perhaps should have stayed closed.
Throughout, Gibbons and her collaborators maintain a needling sense of unease that, when punctured, allows for fabulous melodic blowouts. ‘Reaching Out’ initially resembles a drunk on slick cobbles, its drums bucking and sliding, before cohering into something almost celebratory, while the spiralling hooks of ‘Beyond the Sun’ only just manage to keep the track’s core dissonance at bay.
These compositional about-faces match up to lyrics that lurch from heavy to heavier as Gibbons reflects upon grief and mortality in middle age. “All going to nowhere,” she sings during the lavish ‘Floating on a Moment’. “All going, make no mistake.” She doesn’t provide an easy out, instead letting us wonder how much more pat carpe diem bilge we can stomach. In the process, she subverts the roots of own legacy with vital new work that exists in the now because it has to.
Details
- Release date: May 17, 2024
- Record label: Domino