Beth Gibbons – Lives Outgrown (Domino, 2024)

Something strange is happening to the music, or is it just me? I’m relistening to the albums that has appeared in this first part of the year, like Kim Gordon’s, Idles’, Wadada Leo Smith’s and Amina Claudine Myers’, and this record I’m about to write by Beth Gibbons; and in all this material I feel as something is missing. Differently than in the cases of Moor Mother and St. Vincent, in listening all this records I hear the lack of a deep drive. 

The fact that I’m ok with at least a couple of albums makes me feel comfortable again, but for the rest I can tell that 2024 is becoming maybe a pivotal year. All the Lps I have mentioned are good albums, nonetheless I’m not completely at ease or satisfied when I end listening to them. And this is strange above all in this case, because Live Outgrown is, in theory, the exact record I wanted to hear from Beth Orton. 

Arcoed saws, found objects used as percussions, and then guitars, violins, keyboards and drums, every instrument used to create that peculiar sound which, united to the others, give life to a particular soundscape. I have also found interesting the live renditions at the show ‘Later With Jools Holland’ that you can find on the internet, but I can’t help but feel as I was referring to before. 

Tracks like the dramatic Reaching Out, the intense and embellished with distorted horns Beyond The Sun, the reflective Burden of Life, a Lost Changes that seem an outtake from Portishead’s first album but with a different, less hip hop arrangement, are all well written and excellent pieces, just to name a few. The arrangements are chiselled with attention and sensitivity. 

Lyrics also are intense and only apparently simple, while in effect they deal with becoming older, with the metamorphoses of the soul when the body makes resistance, with the loss of friends and the perspective of death, but again, everything in these songs written in an entire decade are too much contained, quiet, you miss possibly that scratch coming from outside of art and music, from reality, as you can find in the paintings of Bacon or … in the old Portishead albums. 

I just know that for many this album, as the others not completely satisfactory to me I’ ve quoted, will be held high as best releases of the year by so many people, but this is more music that will make me think – about the evolution of music itself and the lack of reference to real life through sound and how it is organised, not through lyrics or the meaning of the songs themselves – than music I’ll listen to enjoy. 

It is strange to me, in fact, that nobody is observing this lack of a link between this music, the one released this year, and our lives – the ‘scratch’ I was referring to is exactly this: something that through its imperfections open a door leaving the real life enter the art organised in sound – and even though I still need to understand why this is happening, I feel like music is becoming more and more self-referential and less as a medium to get in touch with the real self of the artist or of the audience. 

Possibly, I think, in the exact moment I’m writing, this is the key I wanted to find. What if the artists, subconsciously speaking, were in this moment afraid of opening themselves to us, since most of us are hipsters that feel the call of something more real than the bourgeois life but want only the smell of this ‘something’, without having filthy hands for it? 

Being an artist requires an open mind and an open heart, and an artist is also a medium, someone who tries to create a connection between people and a deeper reality than society allow us to see, free from safeties and from injustices of civilized life. But what if we as persons are not willing to connect to the artists anymore? Will they stand naked in front of us, metaphorically speaking, while we’re on our feet with all our clothes and barriers on? 

No. It is an impossible and unbearable situation I believe. So, unhappy as I am to have written a review in which I’ve given Beth Gibbons, an artist I love, a vote that is only a little more than sufficient, as it is for all the records I mentioned above, after months from their release, I must acknowledge all of this and give it back to you, my readers. I don’t see a bright future for our music, but I’d love to be answered back by a bunch of new great discs or concerts in the next months. For the moment, I’d love you to meditate about my warnings. 

The problem is not “we’re too bourgeois”. I’m not referring to the quantity of money we own. The problem is we’re too busy with the occurrences of our lives – society wants us this way, so we will not disturb the rich – and we’re not keen on making new experiences and taking new risks, unless these of a career. But life is not the things we own, etcetera. It is difficult not to moralize, but we don’t have that much time, nor that much music to listen to anymore.