Beth Orton Review: Optimism from an Artist Who Has Made the Best Music of Her Career

At Concorde 2 in Brighton, where the set was built almost entirely from her last two albums, Orton performed her emotionally charged songs for an enthusiastic crowd, backed by a band rooted in jazz and experimentation. The Clock, the main instrument on her 1996 debut album Trailer Park, was cleverly added.

The audience at Concorde 2 Brighton looks largely old enough to have first encountered Beth Orton's music three decades ago, while hanging out in a smoky living room in the wee hours after the club. It was the primary vehicle for his 1996 debut album Trailer Park, which cleverly added classic singer-songwriter lines to hazy electronica. But if they're expecting a night of nostalgia, they're in for a shock. Aside from 1999's Mercury-nominated title track Central Reservation , his set deviates from the music that made him famous and is drawn almost entirely from his last two albums: this year's The Ground Above and 2022's Weather Alive .

It's a bold move if Orton's recent albums aren't so good — the latest fruit of an artistic reboot that began in the mid-2010s, when he shifted a sound that had grown increasingly acoustic and traditional toward something more experimental and adjacent to the dance floor.

He spends most of the concert behind the keyboard instead of playing the guitar. Title track The Ground Above floats clouds of ambient synth over the drums that split the difference between jazz and bass drum, while Cigarette Curls unexpectedly shifts venue from something akin to laid-back soul to echoey-dubbed space. Both Haunted Satellite and Celestial Light veer into the realm of abstraction, and there's a lot of play with his voice. A voice that reinforces its wrinkle and fragility, he purposefully muddles the lyrics until his singing feels less like the focus of the songs than another instrument in the mix. If you wanted, you could draw a spiritual parallel with John Martin's approach to vocals in 1973's Inside Out.

Always adept at choosing collaborators, he is backed by a group of jazz-rooted musicians at home at London's Cafe Otto - bassist Tom Herbert and pianist Sam Bette. But the key instrument on stage seems to be Christos Stylianides' trumpet, its breathy tone shifting from a coloration vaguely reminiscent of the late John Hussell to thick blasts of white noise.

It's both rousing and, when you can make out the lyrics, emotionally charged in a middle-aged way—sleepless nights, the unbearable passage of time, illness, loss—though set closer Otherside wraps itself in a kind of optimism: battered, yet anthemic, Orton's dramatically soul-shifting, gear-filling voice. If the audience comes to hear the old songs, they show no disappointment: by the end of the show, they go crazy. Understandable, given that they're in the presence of something rare: an artist in his mid-50s making the most adventurous and engaging music of his career.