Beth Orton review – battered optimism from an artist making the best music of her career

The audience at Brighton’s Concorde 2 largely look old enough to have first encountered Beth Orton’s music three decades ago, as it wafted around a smoke-filled living room in the post-club small hours. That was the primary means of transmission for her 1996 debut album Trailer Park, which smartly appended classic singer-songwriter tropes to misty electronics. But if they’re expecting an evening of nostalgia, they’re in for a shock. The title track from 1999’s Mercury-nominated Central Reservation aside, her set swerves the music that made her famous, drawing almost entirely from her two most recent albums: this year’s The Ground Above and 2022’s Weather Alive.

This would count as a bold move from someone 30-odd years into their career, were it not for the fact that Orton’s recent albums are so good – the latest fruit of an artistic reboot that began in the mid-2010s, when she shifted a sound that had grown increasingly acoustic and traditional back towards something more experimental and dancefloor-adjacent.

She spends most of the gig seated behind a keyboard rather than playing guitar. The Ground Above’s title track floats clouds of ambient synth over drums that split the difference between jazz and drum’n’bass, while Cigarette Curls unexpectedly shifts its location from something approximating laidback soul into an echoey dubbed-out space. Both Haunted Satellite and Celestial Light venture into the realm of abstraction and there is much playing with the timbre of her voice, amping up its huskiness and fragility, wilfully mangling the lyrics until her singing sounds less like the songs’ focus than another instrument in the mix. You could, if you wished, draw a spiritual parallel with John Martyn’s approach to vocals on 1973’s Inside Out.

Always adept at picking collaborators, she is backed by a band heavy on players rooted in jazz and at home at London’s Cafe Oto – bassist Tom Herbert, pianist Sam Beste. But the key instrument on stage seems to be Christos Stylianides’s trumpet, its breathy tone shifting from colouration that vaguely evokes the late Jon Hassell to densely effected gusts of white noise.

It’s both enrapturing and, when you can make out the lyrics, emotionally fraught in a middle-aged way – sleepless nights, the inexorable passing of time, sickness, loss – although the set closer Otherside gathers itself into a kind of optimism: battered but nevertheless anthemic, Orton’s voice dramatically changing gear and becoming soulful and full-throated. If the audience came to hear the old hits, they don’t evince any disappointment: at the show’s conclusion, they go nuts. Understandably, given that they’re in the presence of something rare: an artist in her mid-50s making the most adventurous, fascinating music of her career.