The return of Beth Gibbons

Thirty years after Portishead’s debut, 22 years after her last album of original songs, Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown is indeed long awaited. Anyone who fell in love with the lush mysteries of Out of Season in 2002 will have wondered not just whether a follow-up would ever arrive, but if it did, whether it would manage to equal the rare combination of delicacy and strength, of glowing textures and unresolved feelings.

Just as Out of Season was made in partnership with Rustin Man (Paul Webb of Talk Talk), the new album is the product of collaboration. Six of these 10 graceful pieces are Gibbons’ own, but four were co-written with the percussionist Lee Harris, also formerly of Talk Talk, one of the two main contributors to the album, along with the multi-instrumentalist James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, Gibbons’ co-producer. Harris is also credited with “additional production”, and one imagines that his presence is responsible for the subtle foregrounding of rhythm, starting with the measured pacing of soft mallets on tom toms behind fingerpicked acoustic guitar and cloudy harmonium on the opening “Tell Me Who You Are Today”.

The sound of the album is a step on, but no less beautifully detailed: the vibraphone and the small choir on “Floating on a Moment”, the violin and baritone viola of Raven Bush on “For Sale”, the care lavished on the timbre of an acoustic guitar, the twang of a dulcimer and the sudden eruption of skronk on “Beyond the Sun”. There’s the contrast between, say, the controlled but definitely sawtoothed climate-protest anger of “Rewind” and the pastoral reverie of “Whispering Love”. Strings are used with strategic subtlety. Some songs refuse to end in silence, preferring the real world of distant children’s voices or, at the very end, blackbirds and cockerels.

Gibbons seems to have abandoned completely the pinched, acrid tone that drew comparisons with Billie Holiday and prefigured Amy Winehouse, the sound familiar from Portishead’s “Glory Box”, which she was still employing on Out of Season‘s “Romance”. Instead she now relies on a natural open vocal sound, perfectly suited to the introspection that drives these songs, apparently a decade in the making and seemingly the product of much thinking about change, mortality and responsibility.

Two literary voices from the last century came into my head as I listened to these songs and tried to understand their mixture of deceptive fragility and guarded optimism. The first, that of Samuel Beckett, in the oft-repeated advice from Worstward Ho: “Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The second, that of Philip Larkin, the last line of An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love.” Maybe those are her perspectives, too.

* Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown is out now on the Domino label. The photograph, borrowed from the CD insert, is by Netti Habel.