Beth Orton first began to surface around thirty years ago, the charismatically detached voice that had featured a little on electronic dance tracks began to plough her own folktronica field with the release of debut album ‘Trailer Park.’ It was a graceful thing of acoustically decorated beauty, full of agelessly memorable songs instantly marking Beth out as an artist capable of pushing folk into bold new 21^st century territories. I caught her live for the first time around then playing the Cambridge Folk Festival and it was immediately clear, observing the largely cross-legged crowd with the question “is it a folk thing?” that she did not belong in anyone’s club. As the subsequent albums and passing years have proved definitively, Orton is not in deference to a style aesthetic or servicing any musical eras and attitudes, she solely fuelling her art and the process of creativity. This, of course, has made Beth impossible to pigeonhole, it is a rare occurrence that a new album comes out from this writer that meets the pre-conceptions attached to it. If she were to ever produce a record worthy of the folktronica tag again, you can be certain it would arrive at the moment it was least expected. But the key detail to all the musical surfing Beth is free to explore is this, whenever she puts out new music it is always something worth digging into. Her peers and inspirations are not merely introspective singer-songwriters, instead she has the art project cache of a Tom Waits or David Byrne, forever tuned in and alert to the real-life stimulations and feelings that feed into her music, no matter what mode or texture the end product possesses.

That said, ‘The Ground Above’ dramatically stands out as a Beth Orton album like no other. If you are looking for that fanfare worthy lead track like ‘Stolen Car’ it is not here. Keeping an ear out for an americana inflected pot-boiler like ‘Concrete Sky’ will see you coming up short. For starters, the suite of eight songs is more like an ensemble creation than anything this artist has in her back catalogue. These pieces, especially at the front end of the record, are closer to meditations or celestial hymns than songs with locked in frameworks. That is not to say that they lack melody or even a rhythmical back bone, but there is a looseness to the vibes captured from these sessions that implies a group of musicians feeling and reacting as they recorded. A circle of trusted conspirators succeeded in turning the studio into a living organism, like a kind of communal breathing. Multi‑instrumentalists Shahzad Ismaily and Sam Beste (Vernon Spring) sketching out shifting emotional weather, drummers Chris Vatalaro and Tom Skinner pushing and pulling the momentum like tides, bassist Tom Herbert anchoring the undertow. Guitars from Dave Okumu, Grey McMurry, and Adrian Utley flicker in and out of frame, while Paul Butler’s presence lends a subtly glowing architecture. Within this constellation, Orton rises as producer, songwriter, singer, and bandleader with a clarity of intent. The music feels taller, more spacious even as Beth has learned to trust the air around and allow it to carry her voice towards a raw, open, vulnerable but honest place.

One of the most revealing insights Orton has offered ahead of this release is that all the songs “are looking through the prism of the years from many directions at once, I’m working with the unconscious, something like lucid dreaming.” This is overwhelmingly evoked during the eight minute plus title track, a piece in which Beth’s voice sounds absolutely choked amidst the stimuli and flashes of memory that engulf her. “Love is the only certainty there is” she sings, and in so doing she hits the mainline of lifeblood that is pulling her through. This music celebrates the kind of love that hits so hard it knocks us off course into new pastures, whilst never kidding itself that these lightning bolts are not closely accompanied by equal amounts of grief, hurt, and pain. As such it is the currency of universal truth Beth is dealing in here, “ecstatic as a mothers love, tearing through the sky to the ground above,” and these sonic landscapes absolutely burn thanks to the natural root ingredients. If it were not for the stuttering, trippy beats and waves of electronic ambience that bookend the piece, it could almost be described as free jazz and even though it is not that, there are enough sonic reference points throughout the album to make the connection. Each song progresses so satisfyingly that they surely were sequenced this way intentionally, a shining example of an album that needs playing in the correct running order. Without this, the joyous release felt on closer ‘Otherside’ would be lost, the sense of journey and passage nailed down as Beth sings of finally weeping while birdsong ushers in a new dawn. The sense of survival and desire to squeeze all the good out of life that we can lay our hands on is tangible here, on the other side of a night filled with the unsettling merging of thoughts and memories both lived and inexplicably inherited. It spins itself into a rousing finale that has our singer projecting out to the sky too, the crack in her voice now the product of strength rather than the punctures heard at the outset. After multiple plays, I am already recalibrating my Beth Orton chronology in readiness to acknowledge this as her greatest album. It clearly argues that she makes her best music not when shackled by the idea of recording a hit, but actually when free to paint the truest picture possible, from an unlimited musical palate, of the life and energy rotating all around her.

Danny Neill

You can buy the album on CD here: https://amzn.to/4vtQTds