Gorgeously Sour Times with Beth Gibbons at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles

There’s a strange dissonance between Beth Gibbons’s shy physical presence and that voice—enormous and unignorable. At the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles last night, the Portishead singer held back from the glare of the roughly 2,000-person audience, standing mid-stage and often shrouded in darkness while her six band members were bathed in light. She didn’t bother with any chitchat, even a hello, letting the songs—most of them from her first entirely solo album, Lives Outgrown—speak for themselves.

Which is just as well, as dissonance suits Gibbons. Her vocals seem summoned as much by spirits as the vibration of muscle tissue in the larynx. From her ethereal pleas of desire and despair floating over the cinematic trip-hop of Portishead’s 1994 debut, Dummy, to her naked introspection on the more earthbound Out of Season, her 2003 collaborative album with Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb (a.k.a. Rustin Man), her voice provides the constant, unshakeable emotional core to whatever soundscape she enters.

Gibbons isn’t a narrative singer. Instead, she masterfully punctuates somewhat opaque lyrics with frailness in parts and piercing alarm in others. The “lives” in Lives Outgrown are key to understanding the album’s spell, and why almost zero attendees at the Orpheum took out their phones: Gibbons conveys untold generations of yearning, love, pain, and loss.

For the first time, either on record or live, she fully indulges a multiplicity of voices. Even a children’s choir arrives on the chilling yet somehow comforting “Floating on a Moment,” in which kids intone “All going to nowhere” before Gibbons concludes with determination and even a bit of optimism: “All we have is here and now.”

The voices of Gibbons’s touring band float mysteriously under her mezzo-soprano as if they’re apparitions. She was in part motivated to write Lives Outgrown after the deaths of loved ones, and to see her sing these songs live, both timid and in full musical force, is to see her confront mortality and unknowable fates, piercing the veil between the here and now and the great beyond, in real time. No wonder she’s nearly crouching on stage.

The two Out of Season cuts in the main set, “Mysteries” and “Tom the Model,” sit comfortably alongside the equally chilly new songs. Gibbons saves two seminal Portishead songs, the doleful “Roads” and the sensual “Glory Box,” for the encore. It’s a testament to her undiminished powers and the immense talent of her band that they feel so different but just as captivating as they were on record, with Geoff Barrow’s atmospheric samples replaced by acoustic flourishes that enliven these perennial tunes. Who knows how long we’ll have to wait for her to tour the U.S., or anywhere else, again, but we’re sure Gibbons still has many more lives to outgrow.