by Ljubinko Zivkovic (@zivljub)
Beth Gibbons burst onto the scene back in mid-nineties with Portishead during trip-hop’s primetime with the band’s now classic album Dummy. Throughout the record, it was her incredible vocals that were the connecting line to the music itself. The album set a trend, not only for Portishead, but for trip-hop itself. Yet, it turned out that Gibbons had a vision that went beyond the boundaries of one genre, as shown on her first solo outing, Out of Seasons (2002), and her collaboration with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra on classical music special, Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) (2019).
Gibbons obviously takes her time to involve herself in projects that bear her name, as it is only now that she presents us with her next solo project, Lives Outgrown. Similar to greats like Leonard Cohen, Gibbons seems to have that slow-evolving, meticulous songwriting and arranging process, scrutinizing every note, every word placed in the lyrics. For some artists, such a process makes no difference in the final result, but with Gibbons, as evidenced here, the results are no less than mesmerizing.
From the start, and the opening “Tell Me Who You Are Today,” Gibbons slowly and subtly builds her songwriting net, with perfectly thought-out arrangements, that fully complement the music, never overbearing it. She even molds her vocals to that effect, never pushing them too forward, but making the listeners perk up their ears to hear what she has to say. What she does say revolves around textured views on life from the viewpoint she has reached.
“I realized what life was like with no hope,” says Gibbons in the album’s press release, “and that was a sadness I’d never felt. Before, I had the ability to change my future, but when you’re up against your body, you can’t make it do something it doesn’t want to do.” That viewpoint is felt throughout the album, through all the songs and their music and lyrics, giving us one of the best of the albums of the year so far.