Lives Outgrown
Album by Beth Gibbons
Released 17 May 2024
Chamber Folk
Label – Domino
Rating – 8/10
Bleakness and beauty combine to form a one-of-a-kind disposition.
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A strained relationship with the concept of time finds itself at the heart of Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown. Incited by the hopelessness associated with losing loved ones, the first album credited to Gibbons and only Gibbons is an extended arm clasping toward vitality, the most reasonable response for an artist to take when faced with bullets.
However, her reaching arm is not an arm but an artillery of guitars, organs, woodwinds, strings and so much more. Her chance to touch the only deity capable of an answer is produced by the form of resource studied by the Portishead singer during her time working with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. Technically, it is produced by Gibbons and the splendid James Ford.
While that knack for collaboration is not just reserved for orchestra or her Portishead brethren – just look at what she’s accomplished working with Rustin Man, Annie Lennox and Kendrick Lamar, to name a few – it is orchestral familiarity that favours her despair. The strings of Burden of Life traverse whilst reflecting the album’s wrath against time; some assemble an arduous, frightening passage of time akin to The Beatles’ A Day in the Life, others crow like a rooster in the morning, another call to the despondent forced to face mortality and heavy change.
Lives Outgrown was written and assembled over ten years, a period sure to come with anxieties and insurgencies of defeatism. In the case of Lost Changes, a decline in infatuation will weigh heavily from time to time, with only whatever optimism one can muster being the light on the horizon. Beth’s voice sounds battered, while she faithfully works with her surrounding chamber to create a sense of lift; as the mood tries to swell, violins dance around like inanimate objects becoming sentient.
The capabilities of the album’s palette are shown off almost arrogantly on Floating on a Moment – I say that with not just love but worship. Gibbons’ vocal melodies sweeten the deal, and the croak of her guitar is soon topped by dulcimers, susurrant backing harmonies, drums that sound like the remains of a military band following a few casualties, and a build-up of atmospheric strings.
Loneliness is marked by a production job that gives each instrument its own dance space, when necessary. The percussion of Reaching Out is out there on its own, eventually bustling as untameable reeds leak out of the speakers. Gibbons’ words field no airs – “I need your love to silence all my shame” – even as they’re joined by harmonies so ghostly that they simply contribute to the loneliness.
Swapping Portis for Radio, the way in which the guitars of For Sale interplay with stray violin strings is Jonny Greenwood-esque. Grappling with the shipwreck inside Beth’s mind, the song is far more folk than much else of the tracklist, but also contains one of the album’s favoured premises; ritualism.
Gibbons uses her own music for the sake of meditation, dancing for a rain of good luck to wash away any hopelessness. But these meditations themselves are riddled with despair, including the delayed guitar strokes of Oceans, and tribal noise of Rewind, an out-of-nowhere jack-in-the-box in tone, on which Gibbons begs for time to be kind to her. Humanising experimentation.
Ritualism combines with a Bo Diddley beat on Beyond the Sun, and appears like a slightly more traditional version of when The Moody Blues would try the same thing where Tell Me Who You Are Today is concerned. The closeness of her voice, flutes, and musical body language in which the song’s general sway sounds like a chant, certainly helps.
Closing track Whispering Love hints that the meditation may have worked, and Gibbons is closer to peace than she once was. She’s definitely closer to nature; acoustic guitars are played as if atop a blanket on a patch of grass, flutes resemble bird calls, and lyrics of trees and sun buddy up to field recordings. Her voice still sounds bruised, but it’s never easy to shrug away uncertainty.
The full force of her nearby chamber completes Beth Gibbons’ tussle with the arduous cheap shots taken by life; Lives Outgrown is a collection of pretty compositions with greater gratification renewed by a long list of necessary instruments. I’m searching frantically for a stone that may have been left unturned, but Beth Gibbons doesn’t waste a movement on her album – this is why one becomes a musician.
Best tracks – Floating on a Moment – Whispering Love.
Rating – 8 out of 10
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