Wandering star returns
Barry Adamson Incorporated
There is something both earthy and elemental about Beth Gibbons’ debut solo album yet, despite its ethereal blues, its music is no cathartic conjuring. Lives Outgrown has been ten years in the making, its songs of motherhood, menopause and mortality carved and whittled from experience to produce a memento mori for the trip-hop generation.
For those who have forgotten or never knew in the first place, Gibbons is the shy singer with Portishead, a band who soundtracked many a moody moment in the Nineties, yet remain timeless in appreciation. Gibbons has rarely been spotted outside their realm, though she did collaborate with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, aka Rustin Man, on the 2002 album Out of Season and deliver a couple of curveballs – singing Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and, more recently, guesting on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr Morale & the Big Steppers album.
Gibbons has collaborated with another former Talk Talk member, drummer Lee Harris, as well as producer James Ford on the torch songs and eerie psych folk of Lives Outgrown. Haunting opener Tell Me Who You Are Today is almost pagan in conception, while bare, bending strings form the bedrock over which Gibbons reflects on the breathy baroque pop of Floating on a Moment.
Heady strings and sonorous drums embellish the insightful jazz ballad Burden of Life and there is further broad but enduring wisdom on Lost Changes. Gibbons enunciates as though delivering a gothic musical theatre number on For Sale. “Just ask yourself, how would you want life to be?” she demands to know over dramatic gypsy violin, hand bells and foreboding wordless vocal intimations.
Beyond the Sun whips up eddying organ, squawking sax, taunting backing vocals and martial drum patterns like a
Wicker Man fever dream, while Whispering Love binds you in its clutches before releasing you to a run-out groove of bucolic farmyard sounds.
The many-splendoured Barry Adamson has been post-punk bass hero for Magazine and The Bad Seeds, a composer of filmic instrumentals, a lounge lizard crooner and now, on the opening track of his first new studio album in eight years, a 21st century rhythm’n’blues man. “Lady, you shot me” he accuses on The Last Words of Sam Cooke.
Cut to Black is a confident, varied affair from the big, brassy strut and blues guitar solo of Demon Lover via the luxe disco of Manhattan Satin to the Hammond-driven roots rock of One Last Midnight. Adamson goes Barry White deep on Mancunian funk number Was It a Dream? while
Beth Gibbons, main; Barry Adamson, right; Davie Scott of The Pearlfishers, left
These Would Be Blues is what Kevin Rowland thinks he sounds like, with its uplifting gospel soul chorale, guitar twang and minimalist strings.
There are strings aplenty and golden melodies to spare on the latest album by The Pearlfishers – no surprise to anyone familiar with the cult oeuvre of Davie Scott, one of our greatest tunesmiths and stylists, who cleaves to the harmonic greats of the Sixties, from The Beach Boys to Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb.
The sepia tones of Making Tapes For Girls contain a salute to the power of music. “I didn’t know how to say the right thing, so I left it to Joni and Paul” Scott sings on the title track, over strings and plangent guitar. He is also happy to indulge more esoteric influences such as Billy Childish, who is referenced on the girl group-meets-country pop vibes of Hold Out For A Mystic, and to hymn The Word Evangeline with a flamencoinflected guitar solo and a shout-out for songs using the same name. What, no Icicle Works?
25.05.24