- The Portishead frontwoman turns to spectral folk music on her solo debut album, exploring loss, aging and grief.
- Beth Gibbons first hinted at the release of her debut solo album on Domino Records in 2013, when the world was a different place. The UK was still a part of the European Union then, Trump as yet unpresidential and the idea of a global pandemic existed almost entirely in the realm of speculative fiction. More than a decade on, the Portishead frontwoman has finally put out Lives Outgrown. Just as the world at large has gone through irreversible change, so too has she.
More folky than anything resembling trip-hop or electronica, Lives Outgrown was made as a conscious decision to move away from the instant gratification of "breakbeats and snares," in her own words. While it's percussively minimal compared to her output with Portishead, the drums on the album are not simply content to take a backseat. They are harnessed with utter precision and to devastating effect. On "Burden of Life," for example, the toms and bass drum gallop like a horse bearing a messenger of bad news, while on the polished power ballad "Reaching Out," they fall in line to form a solid rhythmic body.
The chameleonic singer, who could bend her voice to sound by turns velveteen, vexed, sultry and saturnine in Portishead, is no longer that woman on Lives Outgrown. Where she once advised, "Just set aside your fears of life / With this sole desire" on the Bristol band's genre-defining Dummy LP, she now confesses, with a bone-aching sigh: "The burden of life just won't leave us alone / And the time's never right when you're losing a soul."
Loss and grief cast a shadow over much of the album. Informed by her "anxieties and sleepless night time ruminations" over the past ten years, Lives Outgrown is an unflinching document of the singer's confrontation with both her own impermanence here on earth and that of those closest to her. Nowhere is this more obvious than with "Floating On A Moment," a measured folk-pop number lent a whimsical air by pastoral flutes and jangly guitars. Lyrically, however, she reminds us that we are all "floating on a moment / Don't know how long [...] / Going to nowhere." It's a haunting memento mori, made all the more so by the children's choir that echoes her words.
Gibbons also turns her attention to ageing and menopause, mourning of the effects of time on one's body and the possibilities it once held. This is significant not only because it marks one of the rare moments in popular music where menopause is openly discussed, but also because it marks a turning point in Gibbons' relationship to womanhood and femininity (which she so deftly explored throughout her career in Portishead). The album begins with her whispering, "I could change the way I feel / I can make my body heal." It rings hollow, like a delusional affirmation repeated in front of a mirror. The duplicity in these words is brought to the fore by the dirgelike strings, muted cymbal crashes and smudges of bass clarinet, which call to mind the slow-moving melancholy of a funeral procession. "Tell Me Who You Are" is not, as the first two lines would have you believe, a feel-good empowerment anthem, but rather an elegy for youth, for the illusion of control—for a stable, immutable self.
Thankfully, the musical palette Gibbons draws from is not unrelentingly bleak. Lives Outgrown is a quiet folk album, but there are elements of the carnivalesque and the sublime. Birdsong, samples of children splashing about in a pool and the unmistakable twang of a bowed saw all make an appearance. "Beyond The Sun" bursts with the freewheeling energy of free jazz. Discordant horns squeal and squawk over each other as she wonders, "If I had known where I'd begun / Would I still fear where I might end?" The song is a reckoning with the flipside of mortality, how a fear of death can also create a lust for life.
"Whispering Love" closes the ten-track album on a serene note. For the first time her voice is not hushed, or pained, or operatic, but even-keeled and crystal clear. When she sings, "Oh, Whispering love / Come to me / When you can," accompanied by a gentle flute melody, chirping birds and plucked guitar, she sounds worlds apart from the woman who was convinced she could change the way she feels and make her body heal in the album's first moments. Lives Outgrown is a farewell to the myriad selves Gibbons has outgrown throughout her 59 years, but it also opens up room to imagine what new lives she might inhabit and what new musical horizons she has in store for us.
Lista de títulos01. Tell Me Who You Are Today
02. Floating on a Moment
03. Burden of Life
04. Lost Changes
05. Rewind
06. Reaching Out
07. Oceans
08. For Sale
09. Beyond the Sun
10. Whispering Love