The audience at Brighton\u2019s Concorde 2 largely look old enough to have first encountered Beth Orton\u2019s music three decades ago, as it wafted around a smoke-filled living room in the post-club small hours. That was the primary means of transmission for her 1996 debut album Trailer Park, which smartly appended classic singer-songwriter tropes to misty electronics. But if they\u2019re expecting an evening of nostalgia, they\u2019re in for a shock. The title track from 1999\u2019s Mercury-nominated Central Reservation aside, her set swerves the music that made her famous, drawing almost entirely from her two most recent albums: this year\u2019s The Ground Above and 2022\u2019s Weather Alive.<\/p>\n
This would count as a bold move from someone 30-odd years into their career, were it not for the fact that Orton\u2019s recent albums are so good \u2013 the latest fruit of an artistic reboot that began in the mid-2010s, when she shifted a sound that had grown increasingly acoustic and traditional back towards something more experimental and dancefloor-adjacent.<\/p>\n
Photograph: Andy Hall\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
She spends most of the gig seated behind a keyboard rather than playing guitar. The Ground Above\u2019s title track floats clouds of ambient synth over drums that split the difference between jazz and drum\u2019n\u2019bass, while Cigarette Curls unexpectedly shifts its location from something approximating laidback soul into an echoey dubbed-out space. Both Haunted Satellite and Celestial Light venture into the realm of abstraction and there is much playing with the timbre of her voice, amping up its huskiness and fragility, wilfully mangling the lyrics until her singing sounds less like the songs\u2019 focus than another instrument in the mix. You could, if you wished, draw a spiritual parallel with John Martyn\u2019s approach to vocals on 1973\u2019s Inside Out.<\/p>\n
Always adept at picking collaborators, she is backed by a band heavy on players rooted in jazz and at home at London\u2019s Cafe Oto \u2013 bassist Tom Herbert, pianist Sam Beste. But the key instrument on stage seems to be Christos Stylianides\u2019s trumpet, its breathy tone shifting from colouration that vaguely evokes the late Jon Hassell to densely effected gusts of white noise.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s both enrapturing and, when you can make out the lyrics, emotionally fraught in a middle-aged way \u2013 sleepless nights, the inexorable passing of time, sickness, loss \u2013 although the set closer Otherside gathers itself into a kind of optimism: battered but nevertheless anthemic, Orton\u2019s voice dramatically changing gear and becoming soulful and full-throated. If the audience came to hear the old hits, they don\u2019t evince any disappointment: at the show\u2019s conclusion, they go nuts. Understandably, given that they\u2019re in the presence of something rare: an artist in her mid-50s making the most adventurous, fascinating music of her career.<\/p>\n