{"id":774836,"date":"2026-07-02T05:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T05:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/774836\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T05:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T05:40:09","slug":"beth-orton-the-ground-above-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/774836\/","title":{"rendered":"Beth Orton: The Ground Above Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thirty-three years into her career, Beth Orton<\/a> is making some of the best music of her life. The one-time UK \u201ccomedown queen\u201d followed her run of big-name rave collabs and beat-heavy folk-pop records in the \u201990s and early \u201900s with a restless decade or so, but it was on 2022\u2019s Weather Alive<\/a> that she really figured out how she should sound: expansive live arrangements instead of beats, crack session players instead of big-name producers. The precedent was David Bowie<\/a>\u2019s Blackstar<\/a> and Kate Bush<\/a>\u2019s 50 Words for Snow<\/a>\u2014artists in high-priest middle age getting back in touch with their musicianship while remaining their imperious remove as auteurs, orienting their voice to come from the center instead of the front of their music and surrounding themselves with a jazzy tempest that stirred them to action.<\/p>\n

The Ground Above, Orton\u2019s first album since Weather Alive, is her first release to sound recognizably like the previous one since 2002\u2019s Daybreaker. It\u2019s her second self-produced album in a row, and it brings back a lot of the same players from the last one, including pianist Sam Beste, drummer Tom Skinner, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. The list of new talent is just as impressive, including guitarists Leo Abrahams (Anohni and the Johnsons<\/a>) and Adrian Utley (Portishead<\/a>). The feel, live and snowy, is mostly unchanged from Weather Alive. But it\u2019s a different kind of record, less ethereal, more grounded. Pitchfork\u2019s Sam Sodomsky compared Weather Alive to Springsteen<\/a>\u2019s Nebraska<\/a> as albums \u201cdefined by their atmosphere.\u201d If we\u2019re talking Bruce analogs, this one more easily brings to mind the craggy, live-in-the-studio approach of 2020\u2019s Letter to You<\/a>: technically flawless, never in a hurry, performed with ease befitting a veteran musician but burdened by the psychic and physical toll of aging.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

\u201cTime caught up with me,\u201d Orton sings simply on \u201cCigarette Curls.\u201d The singer has long lived with chronic health conditions, including Crohn\u2019s disease and temporal lobe epilepsy, the latter of which is known to affect the voice. Her voice is even raspier and more cracked than on Weather Alive, but she uses it to her advantage, complementing the grain and grit of all those electric guitars and horns while cutting sharply through the ambient instrumental sections in which she allows her players to indulge for surprisingly long stretches. Her voice takes nearly 40 seconds to emerge on The Ground Above\u2019s opening title track, and she kicks the album off with a hell of a first line: \u201cI\u2019m invincible as grief,\u201d she sings, setting up the core dichotomy on these eight songs\u2014the way Orton\u2019s life as a wife, mother, and successful singer coexists with wounds that will most likely never heal.<\/p>\n

\u201cMotherhood is lonely,\u201d Orton said in an interview<\/a> around the time of Weather Alive. The subtext of The Ground Above is that married life can be lonely, too. She sings about love as a life-giving or sense-obliterating force: \u201cYou kissed me and I knew what I was for,\u201d she sings on the title track, \u201cand it wiped me out like chalk off of a board.\u201d \u201cFor a life that\u2019s cruel, you made it kind,\u201d she sings on \u201cLove You Right,\u201d and it\u2019s crucial that she talks about life\u2019s cruelty in the present tense, something love can fight but not necessarily conquer. Sometimes she reaches into a spiritual or mythological plane for inspiration. The image of \u201cthe ground above\u201d implies an underworld, and when she says she\u2019s \u201cas violent as a blade of spring released\u201d on the same song, it\u2019s difficult not to think of Demeter, the loneliest mother in the Greek pantheon. Like that goddess of the seasons, Orton howls from inside a squall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thirty-three years into her career, Beth Orton is making some of the best music of her life. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-774836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}