Beth Gibbons takes her time with her art. With Portishead, she released only three albums in fourteen years. During one of Portishead’s hiatuses in 2002, she released Out of Season, a collaboration with Rustin Man. Eleven years after the last Portishead album, she released Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), a collaboration with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. But now, thirty years into her career, Gibbon’s first proper solo album is here.
Like her other work, the care taken to craft Lives Outgrown is evident. Throughout the ten dark, brooding tracks, there is meticulous detail in every guitar strum, swelling string, and note of Gibbons’s subtly impassioned voice.
Lives Outgrown was written at a dark time for Gibbons when she endured the loss of loved ones and had to confront mortality. Themes of loss and growing older seep through cinematic landscapes dense with earthy rhythms, swelling strings, and Gibbon’s voice that always sounds on the verge of breaking up and disappearing into her throat.
Album opener “Tell Me Who You Are Today” sets the gloomy tone with Gibbons’s pained vocals, finger-picked acoustic guitar arpeggios, and Raven Bush’s cello and violin that provide tension below the surface before dramatically rising to the top of the sound. Producer James Ford creates an eerie effect by using spoons to strike a piano’s strings.
That inventive approach to sonic compositions is present throughout Lives Outgrown. Gibbons and Ford play instruments seldom found in popular music, such as jute, dulcimer, and recorders. Gibbons wanted to avoid the repetitive back beats common to dance, pop, and trip-hop, so drummer Lee Harris plays rhythms that freely move with the songs rather than providing a steady thump. Those rhythms are sometimes played softly on kettle drums, while at other times, he uses Timpani mallets on household items like Tupperware containers, tin cans, and water bottles.
Gibbons sings about the finality of death in “Floating on a Moment” without a hint of optimism. The verses have sparse instrumentation, mostly just a bassline picked on a fretless bass. In the chorus, haunting background vocals and fantastical hammered dulcimer give the song an ethereal quality. “All trying but can’t escape; all going to nowhere,” Gibbons sings in the bridge. In the theology of the song, there is no afterlife, nothing to look forward to, only inevitable doom. A children’s choir in the outro sounds sinister as it keeps repeating, “All going to nowhere.” Gibbons responds, “All we have is here and now.”
Gibbons’s voice is delicate but carries tension. Though soft, it sounds strained, as she bluntly warns, “You will grow old” in “Burden of Life.” That warning comes with some advice punctuated by a string section that temporarily lifts the song’s sense of dread. “Appreciate the sweet caress, ‘cause honestly, love changes,” she sings.
Portishead’s music is often likened to a score for a spy film, and that can also be said for “Reaching Out,” the most propulsive song on Lives Outgrown. Harris’s jerky rhythms sound like a chase sequence, especially when horns are added for the chorus. “Dont need no other like I need you always,” Gibbons sings. “I need your love to silence all my shame.” By design, Lives Outgrown does not have the danceable grooves of Portishead’s music, but fans of the more experimental aspects of Gibbons’s former band should love the album. The orchestral compositions and atmospheric tension paint bleak portraits well-suited for Gibbons’s somber voice. That voice is as good as ever, able to wring drama from each utterance of her poetic tales of loss.
