BETH ORTON – THE GROUND ABOVE: REVIEW
- 5 hours ago
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BETH ORTON
The Ground Above (Partisan/Mushroom)
THE TRAVAILS – which is an inadequate word to describe them, but bear with me – which have beset Beth Orton have been both physical (a long struggle with Crohn’s and series of epileptic episodes) and emotional (grief, most notably, but also the complexity of parenthood). She has not averted her songs or our eyes from them, and her previous album, Weather Alive, plunged deeply into their challenges while immersed in a thick fog, simultaneously offering her most consistent quality in more than a decade but falling short, for me, of satisfaction.
It would be tempting to say that she has moved on from those core constituencies of her life with this album, which is in some ways earthier and more lyrically expansive than its predecessor with the past bubbling up, synthetic sounds creeping back in alongside organic tools like guitars, for example, that emerge from what comes across as an earned/lived in band atmosphere unlike Weather Alive. And the opening lines of the album and its title track declare “I’m invincible as grief/Violent as a blade of spring released”, seemingly reinforcing that assumption.
But to think so is to ignore the centrality of all these things to Orton’s life, the bit happening in the ground above, and to misunderstand how her world keeps being shaped by, in response and in conjunction with, them, these subterranean elements. The next lines in that tile track are “Ecstatic as a mother’s love/Tearing through the ground to the sky above” and she speaks of singing in choirs of the gods “every time I think of what got lost”, as if strength can be found, and “I’m euphoric as a war/When I know who it is I’m fighting for”, as love is a reason to defend.
Except, maybe, possibly, when its destructive qualities are as possible, and self-directed. In a stunning couplet later in the same song, addressing a lover ostensibly, but pointing even closer, Orton says “And you kissed me and I knew what I was for/And it wiped me out like chalk off of a board”. Indeed, love does not live easily anywhere here even when enjoyed.
For more than eight minutes that grow grander, fuller – drums propelling, trumpet dancing above the pulse, piano more echo than lead and bass insinuating then asserting – this song fills space. It is a statement song that doesn’t bellow but is hard to ignore, reaching out further each time you hear it. And it finds its lingering effects in songs that work on a far smaller profile, such as the post-club/pre-dawn shadow that is Celestial Light, which is relatively empty of instrumentation but hefty in its weight, or the David Sylvian-as-‘70s soul Cigarette Curls that is languid in tempo but carries such a level of hurt beneath – “Time caught up with me/Eventually time can true” – that the guitar solos rise and drift away like skin grazed rather than scored, but the mark won’t disappear.
Orton’s voice, which has been cracked further and reshaped by the physical strains endured, makes more than a virtue of its frailties as each crack and diversion tells a story somehow, each touch of beauty posing a question. She rides each wave across the top, dips and variations less necessary than the way she guides us through, promising that she will “catch you when you’re falling”. And maybe she would.
When she asks as the album ends, “Did you make it through?”, it is not a given that you did, or that she would, but it feels nothing like a chore, just an experience that needed to be had because it happens.
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