Lives Outgrown Beth Gibbons

Album review

Given how notoriously slow Portishead's output has been—three studio albums in three decades—it's not terribly surprising that vocalist Beth Gibbons waited until 2024 to release her first proper solo record. (Co-founder Geoff Barrow, meanwhile, has been incredibly prolific with soundtrack work, production, and other side projects.) While there was 2002’s Out of Season that found Gibbons working with ex-Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb, and also the decidedly unexpected 2019 album of her vocalizing alongside the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra for a performance of Górecki's Symphony No. 3, both of those releases relied heavily on their collaborative nature.

Lives Outgrown is much more personal, said by Gibbons to have been necessitated and inspired by the loss and lost-ness that have visited her in middle age. The album is as removed from the torchy/folky vibe of Out of Season as it is from the claustrophobic electronica of Portishead (and there's not an orchestra in sight). Gibbons' voice is still haunting and slightly haunted, providing maximum emotional impact despite the fact that—even on her debut solo album—her singing resides toward the middle-back of the mix.

Compositionally, structurally, and atmospherically, there's a lot that Portishead fans will recognize; "Floating on a Moment," for instance, is a quiet and rather genteel piece, but the dynamics will be instantly familiar to fans of her other work, even if the largely acoustic presentation is not. Even though many of the numbers reside on the slow/spare end of the spectrum, there's also a clattering rawness to the material that's surprising. It all builds to a stunning, dramatic crescendo with two songs planted right in the middle that are anything but restrained. First is "Rewind"—a piece that is abstract, pan-globalist, glitchy, and as evocative as it is inscrutable, like Dead Can Dance collaborating with St. Vincent at her most intense. That's followed by the swaggering, near-funky groove of "Reaching Out," on which Gibbons seems to be letting loose a bit.

Surrounded as they are by introspective, searching, and occasionally weary-sounding numbers, these two explosive tunes chart out a sort of alternate universe of possibilities for Gibbons' extracurricular work. However the capstone here is the penultimate track, "Beyond the Sun," a vast, intensely dramatic number with dissonant, Eastern European arrangement that is simultaneously the most direct and most magical piece of music on the album. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz