Ten songs written over ten years: karst times for Beth Gibbons, whose music-making resembles a long process of stratification and distillation, or if you prefer the production of a mineral and at the same time gaseous reserve, whose crumbly consistency reveals differently lysergic properties. Her is an escape from standard rhythms (both traditional ones and those accelerated by contemporary dynamics) which is already in itself an expressive gesture, with which the form and substance of the sound code are in fact imbued. That is, there is a palpable continuity – a congruence – between these songs and the fact that they are fermented outside of standard production cycles, foreign to the morphological patterns suggested (or dictated) by algorithmic conveniences and to the greater glory of streaming platforms.
Having said that, we might as well underline what is known: this is Gibbons’ debut work as a soloist. He’s not too surprising, taking into account his character and his path. However, how to say, it’s strange. Also regarded as the previous studio album – in collaboration with Paul Webb aka Rustin Man – in many ways she already seemed quintessentially Beth Gibbons, at least as we could surmise her voice and hers inclination outside the expressive channel Portishead. The present here Lives Outgrown has in common with the marvellous Out Of Season – apart from the implication of loss of control and escape from the rut that hovers in the title – the nature of anti-performative work, which does not pursue contemporary styles or themes but unravels the tangle by keeping faith with its own rules, with the intention of overturning the the siege of connection in an isolation that means reflexivity, attention to detail, openness to the imponderable, hesitation on the threshold between awareness and intuition.
The result is a sound constantly on the verge of betraying the already beaten path, always on the edge of a change of emotional state, poised between restless turmoil and shadowy enchantment, immersed in tradition but able to levitate anomalously, poignant and elusive, now warm and the next moment ghostly. Acoustic timbres dominate, guitars, strings, woodwind, bow saw, percussion, with found sounds and voices (bucolic noises, chatter, sighs…) to make the walls porous, to open gaps between interiors and plein air, between mind and life. Almost an invitation to think of yourself as a germinate of sensations, emotions, thoughts, a ramification of experiences whose meaning is never a result but an emergence. A process that takes place over time, unrolls the ribbon of becoming, undergoing – it goes without saying – the slow and relentless attraction force of entropy. In short: Beth reflects on growing old, on the sensation of falling into the dark belly of nothingness (“The feeling of falling/The shadows warning/Wanting to quiet to tame this disorder”) and on the impossibility of finding meaning in it (“We’re all lost together/We’re fooling each other/We try but we just can’t explain”), hence the need to cling to the dizzying grace of the moment (“But all we have is here and now/All going to nowhere, to nowhere”).
The light that falls on these songs is therefore serious, like a twilight warmed by the intermittent flocking of visions that sketch the contours of the mystery, leaving it (obviously) intact, but which, by declaring the fragility of the body – its wearing out and vanishing -, the limits of intelligence (“If I had known you from the start/Would I still visit the place in the dark?”) and the volatility of emotions (“The feeling of falling/The shadows warning/Wanting to quiet to tame this disorder”) they at least manage to define the terms of the conflict, to identify it as a problematic field, perhaps the only one that really matters.
For all this, we must be willing to accept that these songs take on the task of to exceed the very dimension of the song, which pushes us to listen to them as if we were not listening to songs but attempts to crack the primary anguish – mostly repressed: that is, the vertigo of no longer being – starting precisely by deconstructing the hallucinatory delight of entertainment , its distracting schematicity. To this end, Gibbons – backed by producer James Ford (recently working on The WAEVE, Depeche Mode, Blur, The Last Dinner Party, Pet Shop Boys…) – resorts to the toolbox of psychedelic folk, but does so by overturning it on the ground and reconstructing a random map, a road map to get around in existential disorientation without getting completely lost. Already the opening Tell Me Who You Are Today it seems like a kind of – indeed – initiatory rite, with the misty orchestral texture, the circular arpeggio, the exotic bellows of the strings and the voice that multiplies and stratifies.
This strategy of estrangement is repeated with significant variations in the tumultuous Beyond the Sun with its wavering sharpness Nick Drakethe pressing Balkan triumph and the percussive flair (entrusted to Lee Harrisalso the author of the piece), in displaying the shady melodrama of Burden Of Life (with decidedly cinematic results), in that one Reaching Out that vaporizes grazing blues and then throws it into a black fire (how could a Tom Waits with the swordfish trombone in a slippery hallucination Thom Yorke), or even in LostChanges which entrusts the verses to a Watersian apprehension (but the melody recalls Drive of the REM) while three-quarters of the chorus – in a sad triumph of strings – reveals Sixties romantic abandon.
It is quite natural to establish a parallel with the path undertaken in recent years by PJ Harveybut while the Dorset singer-songwriter seems choose to escape her previous self (also to avoid being trapped by it), for Beth this going out of the way – leaving behind the cumbersome Portishead legacy, closing doors and windows with respect to the demands of the present – appears to be the only viable way. In fact, you see how she seems at ease with herself and fully expressive precisely when she manages to disperse the traces behind the most unusual plots, and vice versa she flattens out in the more canonical passages, as happens in Oceansa waltz with a hint of apprehension that spreads in a traditional folk area with vague pop infatuations (the chorus paints a melody almost… Abba) with suggestive but all in all predictable results, including vocal interpretation.
Vice versa, Floating on a Moment it possesses strength and substance precisely because it seems to engage in a work of progressive boycott of expectations, first setting up a quiet inhabited by curious presences (behind the wooden arpeggio flutter puffs, puffs, vibraphone inflorescences, bow saw hisses…), then a choir with gothic influences – with something of Bowie Of Blackstar – introduces the milky grace of the chorus, its slow and dense spread towards a horizontal awareness that flows into a highly emotional farewell. Together with the conclusion Whispering Love – with its terminal rapture in waltz time inhabited by a creak that makes one think of the swinging of an old swing – constitutes the pinnacle of an album that is all the more intense as it is more reluctant, liminal, composed of subtle particles intent on crossing the present without let yourself be intercepted.
It’s a job that resembles to Beth’s gaze, averted, declined, disposed to disconnection or at most to a low-profile connection as a necessary condition to rejoin the rhythms and density of reality. Of that reality that awaits us at the end of the hallucination, inevitable, ruthless, wonderful.
