2024 - UK
Chamber Folk, Progressive Folk, Art Rock
« Time is but a memory / Beautiful for some / Feathered like a majorette / In a rose unsaid and done”. 22 years ago, Beth Gibbons was singing about how we all are indebted to time. She was 37 and 13 years late she started recording songs again, because she understood her relationship with time was changing. From Out of Season to Lives Outgrown the road has been turbulent. Portishead’s breathtaking album Third was released as well as a Symphony composed by Gorecki and interpreted by Gibbons about humanity’s sorrow. The composer encountered losses and realized her future was getting shorter as her past kept growing. “I could change the way I feel / I can make my body heal / Free from all I hear inside”, the first line from Tell Me Who You Are Today paves the way for the astoundingly shrill and heartening songs that are about to follow. Surrounded by the only instruments she could use to craft the precise sound she wanted (a farfisa, spoons, solina, Chinese jute, bowed saw, singing tube, harmoniums, etc), Beth Gibbons molded a wooden atmosphere where each tree has been placed exactly where she wanted them. As you enter Lives Outgrown, both scared and fascinated, this eternal voice takes your hand and shows you around. Look at those newborn sprouts and dying giants, they were turned into music so you could hear how they grow and how they die.
« I never noticed the pain I proceed / Cause my heart is tired and worn ». Just like those lyrics from Oceans, this album feels like a self-actualization in order to finally recognize what your body and mind is made of : a world of oppositions. It’s no surprise to a have a song called Floating on a Moment, taking you to the skies, instantly followed by Burden of Life, keeping you grounded into the earth. The first one is looking at death in the eyes, supported by a choir of kids, while the second focuses on the life that were lost around her, carried by an almost dissonant violin filled with sorrow. These are the two faces of Beth Gibbons’ new wanderings. By looking inside and outside, she reckons all the deaths that shape our lives. On Oceans, it’s the death of fertility : « Fooled ovulation, but no babe in me / And my heart was tired and worn / Reality fails me, it takes me so close / I reach out over, can’t take anymore ». Then it’s love, nature, beliefs and illusory boundaries. It takes a lifetime to die, but this terminal gesture is just one experience with death among many others. « I’m heading toward a boundary / That divides us » she sings on Floating on a Moment. It’s easy to understand that here Gibbons is talking about death, but she also could be mentionning that realization about death : that it remains something familiar we carry all our life. And the only thing to do when you acknowledge that, is to fight not to get eaten. « Hey you over there / Change your heart instead of stare / Feel alive, hold your own / Forever ends, you will grow old » is the mantra she repeats on Lost Changes.
But despite all of her will, she can’t help but feel trapped in time. She paints us as people who are « all tryin’ but can’t escape » on Floating on a Moment so « we’re fooling each other… we try but we just can’t explain » she concludes on Lost Changes. Doubts, regrets, resentment, loss, all these deafening thoughts come together in Gibbons’ mind to shape the sounds of her reasoning. It’s in the drums, in the choirs and, ultimately, in the tone of her voice. We’ve known Beth Gibbons’ voice for her raw sensitivity, sometimes almost theatrical with her remarkable vibrato, but in Lives Outgrown she reaches another level of subtelty. And even when her voice remains in that rather low register, Gibbons’ vocal work is as stirring as ever. With songs such as Beyond the Sun or Rewind, the atmosphere gets even more tensed. On the latter, with its drumming section punctuated by distorted strings, it’s almost as if she was flirting with american primitivism or a kind of post-rock between Robert Wyatt and Cul de Sac that makes her music feel ancient, almost tribal. « Empty with our possessions / And trouble is we still feel unfed / Hunting her down, sweet mother nature / Till nothing is left if this goes on ». Rewind probably is the most critical song off the album. It’s about how humanity destroys the Earth and ourselves with it, until a point of no-return, or no-repair. « If we don’t stop now, will we go too far? » she keeps asking on For Sale. If Gibbons feels trapped, she’s here to make us feel the same.
You can take Lives Outgrown as a warning, an invitation, an advise or a testimony, all these perspectives are contained within the music. On Reaching Out, ghostly voices ask « Where’s the love gone, where’s the feeling, where’s the belief in the words we’re breathing ? » These voices are longing for a reconnection. « Listen to me » says Beth Gibbons on the opening song, it’s an endless repetition of calls and questions, fights and embraces. On Burden of a Life, she recalls with nostalgy, « The summer breeze, the days were long » but on the final song Whispering Love, « the summer sun, always / Shines through, the trees of wisdom ». It’s like Beth Gibbons finally understood how to use those feelings of a past filled with deaths in order to help her live forward. Because if Oceans was about the death of fertility, Gibbons rises as she sings « But I will dive in the ocean / In the floor I’ll gather my pride / And I will seek to undress the answers / On my knees, I’ll look evermore ». There are moments of petrifying fear on Lives Outgrown, but in the end what you remember are the moments of pure elevation. It’s that heavenly whistle on Lost Changes that takes you into a timeless partition written by Ennio Morricone, it’s the birds and the hen singing in Whispering Love, it’s the words « They will rise where they can / When they know they are safe to go / Oh whispering love / Blow through my heart / When you can ». In the end, all that is left is the wind blowing in the trees. Beth Gibbons built us a forest where death is a neighbour, and it’s up to us to protect and embrace that place at all cost.
« I never noticed the pain I proceed / Cause my heart is tired and worn ». Just like those lyrics from Oceans, this album feels like a self-actualization in order to finally recognize what your body and mind is made of : a world of oppositions. It’s no surprise to a have a song called Floating on a Moment, taking you to the skies, instantly followed by Burden of Life, keeping you grounded into the earth. The first one is looking at death in the eyes, supported by a choir of kids, while the second focuses on the life that were lost around her, carried by an almost dissonant violin filled with sorrow. These are the two faces of Beth Gibbons’ new wanderings. By looking inside and outside, she reckons all the deaths that shape our lives. On Oceans, it’s the death of fertility : « Fooled ovulation, but no babe in me / And my heart was tired and worn / Reality fails me, it takes me so close / I reach out over, can’t take anymore ». Then it’s love, nature, beliefs and illusory boundaries. It takes a lifetime to die, but this terminal gesture is just one experience with death among many others. « I’m heading toward a boundary / That divides us » she sings on Floating on a Moment. It’s easy to understand that here Gibbons is talking about death, but she also could be mentionning that realization about death : that it remains something familiar we carry all our life. And the only thing to do when you acknowledge that, is to fight not to get eaten. « Hey you over there / Change your heart instead of stare / Feel alive, hold your own / Forever ends, you will grow old » is the mantra she repeats on Lost Changes.
But despite all of her will, she can’t help but feel trapped in time. She paints us as people who are « all tryin’ but can’t escape » on Floating on a Moment so « we’re fooling each other… we try but we just can’t explain » she concludes on Lost Changes. Doubts, regrets, resentment, loss, all these deafening thoughts come together in Gibbons’ mind to shape the sounds of her reasoning. It’s in the drums, in the choirs and, ultimately, in the tone of her voice. We’ve known Beth Gibbons’ voice for her raw sensitivity, sometimes almost theatrical with her remarkable vibrato, but in Lives Outgrown she reaches another level of subtelty. And even when her voice remains in that rather low register, Gibbons’ vocal work is as stirring as ever. With songs such as Beyond the Sun or Rewind, the atmosphere gets even more tensed. On the latter, with its drumming section punctuated by distorted strings, it’s almost as if she was flirting with american primitivism or a kind of post-rock between Robert Wyatt and Cul de Sac that makes her music feel ancient, almost tribal. « Empty with our possessions / And trouble is we still feel unfed / Hunting her down, sweet mother nature / Till nothing is left if this goes on ». Rewind probably is the most critical song off the album. It’s about how humanity destroys the Earth and ourselves with it, until a point of no-return, or no-repair. « If we don’t stop now, will we go too far? » she keeps asking on For Sale. If Gibbons feels trapped, she’s here to make us feel the same.
You can take Lives Outgrown as a warning, an invitation, an advise or a testimony, all these perspectives are contained within the music. On Reaching Out, ghostly voices ask « Where’s the love gone, where’s the feeling, where’s the belief in the words we’re breathing ? » These voices are longing for a reconnection. « Listen to me » says Beth Gibbons on the opening song, it’s an endless repetition of calls and questions, fights and embraces. On Burden of a Life, she recalls with nostalgy, « The summer breeze, the days were long » but on the final song Whispering Love, « the summer sun, always / Shines through, the trees of wisdom ». It’s like Beth Gibbons finally understood how to use those feelings of a past filled with deaths in order to help her live forward. Because if Oceans was about the death of fertility, Gibbons rises as she sings « But I will dive in the ocean / In the floor I’ll gather my pride / And I will seek to undress the answers / On my knees, I’ll look evermore ». There are moments of petrifying fear on Lives Outgrown, but in the end what you remember are the moments of pure elevation. It’s that heavenly whistle on Lost Changes that takes you into a timeless partition written by Ennio Morricone, it’s the birds and the hen singing in Whispering Love, it’s the words « They will rise where they can / When they know they are safe to go / Oh whispering love / Blow through my heart / When you can ». In the end, all that is left is the wind blowing in the trees. Beth Gibbons built us a forest where death is a neighbour, and it’s up to us to protect and embrace that place at all cost.