Ten years on, Beth Orton is still a bit of a mystery. Press materials for her new album, Comfort Of Strangers, include a quote from the writer Dave Eggers. He’s talking about his obsession with the song “Sweetest Decline” from Orton’s 1999 album Central Reservation, which he says he listened to “on a continuous loop” for six days. “I tend to try to wear a song out, to rid myself of it,” he says. “But that song, I still haven’t solved.”
Which is another way of saying, she’s hard to get a fix on. Orton has managed the trick of pursuing a relatively straightforward folk-pop career while always seeming to be doing something a little different. From the otherworldly strings that announce “She Cries Your Name”, the first song on her 1996 debut Trailer Park, to the new album’s Led Zeppelin quotes, Orton has framed and ornamented her music in unexpected and sometimes striking ways. She ended Trailer Park with ten-plus minutes of dubby trip-hop called “Galaxy Of Emptiness”; brought 1970s folk-jazz cult hero Terry Callier in for backing vocals on Central Reservation; sang with Emmylou Harris and Ryan Adams on Daybreaker, her third album; and worked with producers including the Chemical Brothers, William Orbit, and Ben Watt of Everything But The Girl.
The constants through all that have been Orton’s singing and songwriting. Her melodies are strong, if languorous, and show the inevitable influence of the Joni Mitchell pensive-girl-with-guitar school as well as modern British folk music (the equally inevitable Nick Drake) and, not least, classic soul records of the 1960s and ’70s. And if soul is important to her songs, it’s indispensable to her singing. Because she is British, female, and more or less a neo-folkie, it’s not uncommon to see Orton’s name in the same sentence with Sandy Denny. But there’s at least as much Dusty Springfield — not to mention Annie Lennox — in her slinky bends and slurs.
Orton’s voice is her most obvious strength. It is immediately identifiable and unmistakable, large and rich but restrained. She rarely oversings, preferring vocal gestures to sweeping statements, implication to explication. But there’s a downside to that understatement. As the weaker stretches of Central Reservation and Daybreaker demonstrate, when she’s not moored to sturdy songs, Orton’s discretion can sound a lot like aimless drifting. Unlike, say, Springfield, whose dusky warmth could light up a lush string arrangement, Orton has a slight chill to her timbre that works best with clean, sharp arrangements. That’s why her early teamings with Orbit and the Chemical Brothers were so successful: She was comfortable with their electronic remoteness.
It’s also why her partnership with producer Jim O’Rourke on Comfort Of Strangers is a happy fit. A smart and unpredictable musician, erstwhile member of Sonic Youth, and fellow traveler to Stereolab, Smog, and John Fahey, O’Rourke is most of all a specialist in sonic texture. While I’m not among the most enthusiastic admirers of his work on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, even that album’s blurry abstractions have an aural coherence (they fall apart, by design).
With Orton, O’Rourke pared things down, recording in mostly first takes over just two weeks. The two of them play most of the instruments, with assistance from percussionist Tim Barnes and Tin Hat Trio pianist Rob Burger. Strings and horns are few and far between; O’Rourke uses meaty bass lines and crisp drums to anchor the surprisingly compact songs. The result is Orton’s sparest-sounding album since Trailer Park, and her most efficient ever. Only one of the fourteen tracks breaks the four-minute mark, and five of them clock in under three minutes.
It helps that Orton has a strong set of songs to work with, all written by her (with help from O’Rourke and singer-songwriter M. Ward on the title track). The bouncing piano jaunt of “Worms” and the almost-rock ‘n’ roll of “Shopping Trolley” show her aptitude for pop hooks like nothing since “Someone’s Daughter” on her first album. She spans her usual range from folk-rock (“Countenance”) to supple northern soul (“Conceived”), with occasional surprises (the aforementioned Zeppelin nod, which comes at the end of “Heart And Soul”, with Orton repeating “Whole lotta love in your heart” in a cheeky Robert Plant crescendo).
Not everything connects. “Safe In Your Arms” is a bluesy soporific, and “Feral Children” is pleasant but indistinct. When she’s just being pretty, Orton can slip into Starbucks/Sarah MacLachlan territory. But O’Rourke never lets her slide too far; on the melancholy “Absinthe”, Orton’s harmonica and a pulsing undercurrent of percussion provide warm counterpoints to the morose vocal. And the title track, a wistful piece of rainy-day soul, is lovingly accented with marimba, handclaps, and washes of organ.
Perhaps surprisingly, given that she seemed to arrive as a fully formed vocalist, Orton shows some new confidence in her singing. It appears in the way she sometimes rushes her words for effect and other times stretches them into a near-snarl. She’ll never be as comfortably muscular as Lennox, which may be a good thing, but the brash way she almost sneers “I don’t care how much religion you got” in “Heart And Soul” is a welcome bit of directness from an instinctively indirect singer.
But if Comfort Of Strangers is Orton at her most exposed, it’s only by a matter of degrees. “Least concealed” would be a better way to put it. She remains an elusive and restless artist, moving from album to album and collaboration to collaboration, always sounding like herself without ever being too clear about who exactly she is. That kind of ambiguity could be wearing — there’s a thin line between enigmatic and dull — but Orton has managed to sustain it for more than a decade. She demands to be taken on her own terms, even if she won’t quite say what those terms are. As she sang on the song that beguiled Dave Eggers, “You can’t pin this butterfly down.”
