Beth Orton "Comfort of Strangers" (Astralwerks)
By Tim Den
Monday. May 15, 1:31 AM
Expectations brought down to earth.

I took to Beth Orton’s last studio album, Daybreaker, almost immediately. Sure, I could chalk the obsession up to the myriad of production values courtesy of her famous beat-making friends, but the record captured a sort of transient stillness / sadness / melancholy that I completely identified with as I listened to the disc on a two-month cross-country journey. “Paris Train” and “Mount Washington” especially – with their titles implying exotic places that may or maybe not be metaphors for isolation (the former) and out-of-reach destinations (the latter) – emitted a comforting loneliness that I was all too happy to wrap myself in. The sparse, low-end heavy engineering job on those two tracks perfectly complimented the mood of the melodies, endowing upon them a sense of seriousness that pierced right through my heart. No disrespect to the rest of the album, but based on those two songs alone, I was a huge fan.

Hungry for more, I tracked down Orton’s previous album, the critically-acclaimed and much more folk-oriented Central Reservation. I was sure that its contents were going to provide me with more transcendental, revelatory musical moments… but I was wrong. I found it to be filled with meandering, lifeless noodlings – both vocally and musically – with one or two solid hooks popping up here and there (the title track, “Stolen Car,” etc.) as to not sink the entire ship. For the most part, the album felt bland, meaningless, and not melodically memorable. I was confused. Was Daybreaker a fluke from an otherwise mediocre artist? I knew that her next studio effort would give me the answer, for its quality will prove if Orton is indeed capable of sustaining the heights reached by Daybreaker… or reveal her to be a pedestrian who stumbled upon greatness by accident.

After hearing the first three songs of Comfort of Strangers, I was ecstatic. “I knew it! She’s a master songwriter who hadn’t hit her stride yet when Central Reservation came out! Listen to those tasty melodic turns! The strange but effective way she stretches the word ‘ain’t’ out into four notes on ‘Countenance!’ This is great!” But then I heard the remaining 11 songs. Sure, there are outstanding moments – the air-y “Rectify,” the rollicking “Shopping Trolley,” and the heart-wrenching title cut – but for the most part Comfort of Strangers is no more convincing than Central Reservation… with even less sonic imagination. Part of the reason could be because Orton recorded the album quickly with producer Jim O’Rourke in some kind of a test to capture a “loose, intimate, unpolished, unguarded” feel, but at what cost? All 14 songs here feel homogenous and uniform, their collective births too close to each other to offer any individuality. It’s a downfall that this process of record making often suffers from, and in the case of Comfort of Strangers it’s a shadow that the album never shakes.

However, the main problem resides in the fact that, like Central Reservation, Comfort of Strangers never steps up to the plate hooks-wise. Here, Orton is more than content to string a bunch of arbitrary chord changes together and speak-sing barely-there melodies over ‘em (“Safe in Your Arms” being the best example). Coupled with her strange accent and singing style – slurred and awkward pronunciation, random voice breaks, and an affinity to emphasize every other syllable (“FEral CHILdren can FIGHT FOR their LIVES”) – it becomes infuriatingly annoying after 14 songs. Imagine writing your first song: fumbling over chords, trying out different combinations, testing out vocal lines that may or may not work, then settling on the first ideas that present themselves. “Yeah, that’ll do.” Parts of Comfort of Strangers sound exactly like that.

So I guess I’ve found my answer: Beth Orton is not the creative entity I thought she was. She has moments of brilliance, yes, and has released an absolutely fluid and diverse album in the past (Daybreaker, duh), but my expectations of her have been brought down to earth. Sometimes the truth hurts.
www.bethorton.mu
www.astralwerks.com

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Tim Den

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