Comfort of Strangers - Beth Orton

Track list:

1. Worms
2. Countenance
3. Heartland Truckstop
4. Rectify
5. Comfort Of Strangers
6. Shadow Of A Doubt
7. Conceived
8. Absinthe
9. A Place Aside
10. Safe In Your Arms
11. Shopping Trolley
12. Feral Children
13. Heart Of Soul
14. Pieces Of Sky

Running time: 44 minutes
Released: 2006

I have a strange musical loyalty gene or something, because I keep buying records from artists long after I stop actively enjoying their current releases. I think this is such an example. I loved early Beth Orton... Trailer Park, Best Bit and Central Reservation all. Then was much less enamoured of Daybreaker, yet I bought this album at launch. I also picked up last year's release, Kidsticks, though nothing in the decade between this and that and I can't recall actively listening to it at all. Time to reappraise this one.

In truth I remember little. Worms actually starts things off in a promising manner. Simple backing supporting a song that thrives on its vocal. It's such a simple composition that it really works, all the melody comes from Orton's voice. The song is nonsense, but like most of this disc (14 in 44 mins) it is also short so it doesn't have time to instill any feeling of distaste at the oddities. If this is a sense of things to come then I might actually enjoy this album. I don't have that many shorter songs really, and this type of punchiness - there, formed and gone - is actually a nice thing. Brevity can be welcome.

It is the Saturday before Christmas and I have surprised myself by basically being ready. Yesterday was massively productive and the family commitments only begin on the day itself so I have a couple of days to relax before it hits. On the record, things are breezy and warm, its not really speaking to me the way that Orton did on Trailer Park but it's not bad either. Pleasant background music I guess. Not maintaining a constant rhythm on this project doesn't help with approaching this sort of thing with any consistency. I'm sure that in the past I have binned tunes that were simply "fine" or "nice" like this. I could here, too, but I am not really feeling that decisive today.

It's true that the music is not giving me much to write about, but that is as likely to be because the tracks are gone before relevant and coherent thoughts are formed. None of the numbers on this album go over 4.30 in length and many are sub-3 minutes. I've reached the title track already and it feels like I have barely started. This song is the first that makes me feel actively indisposed to it. The vocal sounds a little flighty and a bit more broken, and the sparse backing is more fiddly and offputting than supportive. Compared to Worms, which has a similar high level structure, the execution is off.

I find that the goodwill I felt a mere 2 tracks ago fading, the unwillingness to call this bland and cull is suddenly replaced by the opposite urge. I cannot quite place why.

The general tone of this record is I guess a gentle warmth, it feels a little self-indulgent, self-congratulatory for a nice life. A little comfort bubble, but one that I feel I am outside looking in on, cynically so. That's me being the cynic. I find myself disengaged, distant and unable to find a thread to follow in these tunes. There is a lushness to the sound, and I find that doesn't play well with Orton's voice for me. This is probably ossification of taste, an indication of how I loved earlier material that I am more familiar with. My impression - whether accurate or not - is that the first couple of records were a bit rawer, a bit more visceral, and this one is overdone. 

That said, I rather like the tune on Safe In Your Arms, the longest runner on the album. It has a nicely tilting simple back-and-forth guitar lead and while the arrangement is still a little on the warm and fuzzy side of things, the sounds all rounded off, no hard edges, the tune has more room to grow. The piano deployed here adds something where elsewhere on the album I felt it superfluous. Tellingly, the point at which it feels it might be getting too much is also the point it chooses to close. A good decision, and a gem amidst the pile of stones.

I think the skepticism in my intro is justified by my experience of listening through. There are brief moments here and there when the music within swells and gives joy, but the overwhelming senses I take away from this is apathy and disengagement. Songs that disappoint may contain some nice ideas but then fail to deliver on them - Heart of Soul is a good example of this, where I rather like the approach to the chorus, and the way it breaks the structure from the verses, but I find the vocal does not work for me.

In closing, whilst very little of the album is actively bad, by the same token very little of it has me enthused. I wouldn't complain if someone put this on, but I wouldn't choose to do so myself. Damning with faint praise is damning most of these tunes to the recycle bin.