BETH ORTON - The Ground Above

I′m invincible as grief
Violent as a blade of spring released
Ecstatic as a mother’s love
Tearing through the ground to the sky above

We'd left her grappling with an album that was anything but immediate, flailing in the mud of an unmistakable inner despair, chasing new possible stimuli and unheard sounds through a voice no longer crystalline but mostly frail, broken, barely sketched out between one verse and the next. Four years later, we find her again in search of an unhoped-for salvation, in an intimate work that's even more bloodless. After all, she herself had revealed her ghosts to us in an interview she gave us a few months ago: "I was sitting at the top of the stairs at home and I was very unhappy. I felt like I had no bones, like I didn't exist. I felt like I could let go and fall down the stairs and turn into jelly or rubber. I still remember that feeling now as I tell this, and it scares me."

The eight songs on "The Ground Above" speak of a Beth Orton finally aware of her own mood swings, starting with the opening title track: a devastatingly sad piano ballad, backed by a formidable band that follows the English singer-songwriter with constant, delicate restraint. It's a lineup of musicians that elevates Orton's style by working through subtraction: multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, pianist Sam Beste of Vernon Spring, drummers Chris Vatalaro (Antibalas, Radiohead) and Vishal Nayak (Nick Hakim), trumpeter Christos Styliandes, guitarist Dave Okumu and bassist Tom Herbert.
"The Ground Above" is about melancholy and damnation, antidote and poison. It's a succession of emotional contrasts that fuels melodies sometimes dark ("Before I Knew") and elsewhere filled with a dim light that nonetheless always manages to shine through, thanks to tonal shifts in the chorus that are as unexpected as they are effective ("Cigarettes Curls"). In this subtle dance, the Norwich singer-songwriter also opens the door to jazz-godmother touches that more than once recall the Paul Anka of the latter half of the Seventies - the exquisitely refined and pleasantly smoky Anka of "The Music Man", to be precise. It happens, for instance, in "Waiting", while the following "Celestial Lights" pulls everything back into half-light, with the session players frailly accompanying Orton's cracked voice as she sings of marshes meeting the river, turning her own fears into metaphor.   

And I’m gonna throw my arms around the world someday
Surrender this weight into the sky
I haven’t ever, I haven’t ever made it through the night
Without first getting kissed by celestial light

"The Ground Above" lays bare a quiet pain, yet one that's vivid and, above all, needs exorcising without ever raising its voice, only to be cast aside in its most emotional moments, like "Love You Right", the highest and most "emphatic" point of an exceedingly refined album, where the song emerges - far from a swan song - of a swan preparing to cross the pond and fly free somewhere between the sea and the stars. An album that gives us a singer-songwriter still in a state of grace, who couldn't care less about pleasing at all costs, ending up unconsciously finding the best possible version of herself, and gifting us a seemingly understated songwriting that is somehow full of life.

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19/07/2026