Beth Gibbons abdicated her kingdom: Portishead’s voice returns with a new album

The numerical reference that the Domino label assigned to Lives Outgrown, Beth Gibbons’ new album (and her first truly solo album), when the project began was 281. If you check the number before and after, it follows that she has been working on the album since around 2009. That is, about 15 years. When she started she was 44 years old and now she is 59. It is a considerable distance, in every sense. One would like the singer-songwriter to have explained what the process was like. But not. The only two known interviews with her are from 1994 and 1995, the time of greatest commercial success for her band, Portishead. Since then, silence. Hardly anything is known about her personal life. From her past, that she grew up on a farm. Little more. It’s not that she surrounds herself with mystery, she’s just very reserved.

Portishead was a trio from Bristol, the city that also produced another hidden star, Banksy, composed of Gibbons and musicians Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrows. Together they released, between 1994 and 2008, three studio albums and one live album. The expression “masterpiece” has been so abused that it has almost been emptied of its content, but they are four masterpieces. Theirs was one of those unsought success stories so common in the 1990s. Or it still is: they have never officially disbanded and although their last album, the impressive Thirdis from 2008, they have continued recording individual songs and their last concert was in 2022. When in 1994 they published their first album, Dummythey were included in a label, the trip hopwhich they always denied, perhaps because it ended up becoming a subgenre of chill out. They said that they were emotionally closer to the rage of the grunge. The fact is that Dummy It was a colossal success. At first, it seemed that they were going to comply with the industry routine: an album every two or three years and a tour. That didn’t last long. Tired, they abdicated their throne. More than a decade passed between their second and third album.

“People have started dying around me. I have no hope,” she said when announcing the release of the album.

Outside the group, Gibbons published Out of Season (2002), an album with Paul Webb, a member of another outsider band, Talk Talk. They signed it as Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man. At the time the critics were not very kind, but over the years it has been more and more appreciated. In 2019 he released another unusual album: he gave voice to the Symphony number 3 by Gorecki on an album recorded with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki. He has also been collaborating with the most diverse people: single songs with Kendrick Lamar, Rodrigo Leao, Jane Birkin or Gonjasufi. You never know where she’s going to show up. She’s not going to explain. It is accepted as part of the charm of it.

Why are you publishing your debut precisely now? In February he accompanied the announcement of his departure with a text. “People have started dying around me. I realized what it was like to live without hope,” she expressed. She has always been a bit dramatic, although on social networks, where she usually thanks her fans for their support, she appears smiling and happy.

Her voice, beautiful and languid as always, has lost its drama. It no longer sounds like it’s going to break.

Lives Outgrown It is recorded with the help of James Ellis Ford, producer and member of Simian, and drummer Lee Harris, co-writer of three songs. The album has the strange ability to get you inside. In a world in which music seems to be content with accompanying you while you do something else, in which tricks of artifice, scandalous lyrics or continuous changes of rhythm are used to keep the listener’s attention, Gibbons assaults your brain without shouting, without fuss. , with a sound between folk and avant-garde. This time he sings in a register that is comfortable for him. His voice, as beautiful and languid as ever, has lost its drama. She no longer sounds tortured or like she’s about to break, something that happened in Thirdan album in which he placed himself in an almost unattainable tone.

There aren’t many references to go to. In some song he distantly remembers the Damo Suzuki in it Ege Bamyasi of Can. She has some of the emotionality of Nick Drake. She is a beauty. Delicate and subtle. The album gains in instrumental exuberance as the songs go by and leaves you satiated, with the feeling of having heard something special. The question is whether it would be better if it were a Portishead album. It’s one of the best albums so far this year, but we miss the bad temper of Barrow and the atmosphere of Utley. And it’s hard to shake the thought that this would have been an incredible fourth album from the trio. Maybe it’s a mistake, a consequence of the desire for them to get together again to record a new work. That may come one day, or not.

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