Mercury rising
Her first self-produced wonder amid another season of self-doubt.
Beth Orton
★★★★
Weather Alive
PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP
BETH ORTON was driving when a rather large record label dropped her – and, with that, plans to collaborate with a marquee producer – more than six months into the pandemic. Rather than despair, Orton, then on the cusp of 50, seems to have taken preemptive rejection as a challenge, or perhaps even a promise that the twinkling gloom of her new songs was so stunning it sent clueless executives scurrying.
For the first time in her 30-year career, she opted to produce her songs herself, recruiting a top-shelf cast of musicians like multi-instrumental mensch Shahzad Ismaily and intuitive horn players Alabaster dePlume and Stuart Bogie to command. The result,
Weather Alive, is a complex rumination that looks across false binaries – how you can feel loved but lonely, how you can feel in awe of the world but threatened by it – to find some hard truths in between.
The sounds of these eight tracks nestle somewhere between Talk Talk’s final years and Bill Fay’s late beauties, between Alice Coltrane’s intimate hymns and Fiona Apple’s softest moments. The shuffling wonder Friday Night unfurls as a luxuriant expanse of tide-like synthesizers and mellotron, flute sometimes rising like a firefly to meet Orton’s piano. She ends Fractals as an excitable jazz singer, offering extemporaneous proclamations about magic in a spirited dialogue with dePlume’s saxophone above a taut disco shaped by Toms Skinner and Herbert. And the spectral backing vocals and vintage synth warbles of Forever Young seem to haunt Orton, as if trapping her ache inside some tensile web. Orton’s arrangements are meticulous but never precious, an improvisational spirit exhaled into a Pro Tools system.
But the musical richness only mirrors Orton’s astounding writing here, her frank but impressionistic reflections on modern possibility and suffering. “When the sea comes in, it’s hard to believe it’ll ever go out again,” she sings early on, her voice collapsing near couplet’s end, as if permanently bruised by experience. That is the state of play throughout Weather
Alive, where Orton moves between extolling the restorative power of love to calling herself a whore and asking who could ever love her. The present is a gift during the magnetic opener, where the rising sun is a semaphore of possibility, while it’s an invitation to be let down just four tracks later. The future is a string of broken promises one moment, a series of fascinating challenges the next. There is neither hope nor hopelessness here, just a zero-sum survey of survival.
“I’m gonna throw my cards as far as I can,” Orton half-whispers above flickering electronics during the finale, “to know what’s in my hand.” That is exactly how Weather Alive feels: a test of oneself after a long season of personal challenge. The answer? This is as moving and real as Orton has ever been.