'Weather Alive' by Beth Orton
As a pop-adjacent musical artiste who asserts herself against stylistic expectations, Beth Orton is likely the equal of Björk or Beck. She’s just quieter, and Weather Alive, her first new album in six years, is one of the English singer-songwriter’s strongest demonstrations that caution and nuance can generate a kind of power that amplification and brashness can’t.
It’s also a demonstration that self-effacement and self-confidence aren’t contradictory: Orton produces and engineers the entirety of the album, and she assuredly navigates her voice and piano through a shifting sea of arrangements played by musicians ranging from drummer Tom Skinner (from Sons of Kemet and Thom Yorke’s group The Smile) to saxophonist Alabaster DePlume (an eccentric, inventive Mancunian).
Orton imbues each of the eight songs with distinct, magnetic moods that could make any of them the opener. The actual opener, the title track, revels in gathering and receding storms—keyboard notes glistening like mist, electric guitar chords cracking like lightning—and extends itself toward seven minutes as woodwinds, cymbals, Moog and what could be whale song attain a dying fall as mighty as the crashing end of the Who’s “Love, Reign o’er Me.”
Elsewhere, “Fractals” hops to Skinner and bassist Tom Herbert’s Talking Heads beat, incorporates the signals of Shazhad Ismaily’s synth codes, and floats away on DePlume’s nervously mellow horn; and “Forever Young” uses a repeated short piano figure as the determined rhythmic light in the encroaching darkness of the ballad’s yearning.
Orton’s vocals—imperfect as Emmylou Harris’s later vocals have been imperfect, turning each crack or short breath into another facet of her jeweled emotions—bring the moods closer together as if holding them in cupped hands. As Weather Alive ends with “Unwritten,” an electronically enhanced folk vision of Nebraska-era Springsteen, Beth Orton matches him, Yorke, Beck, and so many others. Quietly. Not serenely.
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