“I’m invincible as grief,” Beth Orton croons rather unconvincingly on the title track to her ninth studio album, The Ground Above. That’s not a slight on the veteran singer-songwriter’s ability to interpret her own lyrics. Rather, Orton’s lack of conviction telegraphs that, by album’s end, her grief will have washed away with the rising of the sun.
At first, though, Orton is content to sit with her sadness, enveloped in the proverbial dark night of the soul. “The Ground Above” moves with urgency, cascading trumpet and tinkling piano dancing across its percolating rhythm section. But most of the album proceeds unhurriedly. It’s both immersive and atmospheric, and the intro to the sparse “Before I Knew” is even Eno-esque.
Yet, Orton’s penchant for electronic noodling, on display as recently as 2022’s Weather Alive, is almost entirely stripped away here. The soulful “Waiting” takes on the form and tenor of a traditional love song in the vein of Carole King. Elsewhere, “Before I Knew” nods to Leonard Cohen (“Sweetest chord I ever heard/Sweet enough to please the lord”), while the rootsy “Cigarette Curls” paints a portrait of a woman who remains vividly alive in Orton’s memory (“Her cigarette curls/The curve beneath the crop of her shirt”).
Orton’s voice is as distinct and beguiling as ever, with some newly creaky, lived-in edges that nicely complement the songs’ jazzy undertones. At times, she’s almost indecipherable—frustrating because her lyrics are worth mulling but forgivable since her voice is so expressive all on its own. The partly spoken-word “I’ll Miss You” in particular boasts some lovely bits of poetry: “The moon a crumpled paper bag/The sun a rusted can/I trip up on familiar love/I stumble on a casual touch.”
The Ground Above’s final two tracks, “Love You Right” and “Otherside,” are decidedly more sanguine than what precedes them, and what started in the dead of night comes to a conclusion with the sweet dawn. As the latter song builds to the album’s most ebullient arrangement, filled with live strings and horns, Orton wakes up to the reality that, for us humans, just making it through the night is perhaps its own kind of invincibility.
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