Here's a review I wrote this morning for our local rag (with some assistance, it has to be said, from my escort on the night):
I didn’t much feel
like going to a gig, being thick with a cold and arthritic, but the lure of St
George’s – surely one of the finest concert venues in the country – and Beth
Orton, who is returning to touring after a decade in which she got married and started
a family, proved too much to resist.
Having first come to
prominence through her collaborations with William Orbit and the Chemical
Brothers and then her own ambient 90s folktronica, these days there’s a somewhat
more traditional feel to Beth Orton’s music. What hasn’t changed, however, is
the sense of longing that pervades so many of her songs, a feeling or yearning
for a better way of being, now lost, or of being haunted by the memory or dream
of a time and a place where life was clearer and more whole.
This
feeling moves gracefully through her new album Sugaring
Season, a beautiful suite of songs, which, like all good albums,
seems to sound better each time you hear it. She played several of its songs at
St George’s, including Call Me The Breeze, Something More Beautiful,
Magpie, and Poison Tree, a particularly compelling
take on the poem by William Blake from Songs of Innocence and
Experience.
For die-hard fans, there
were earlier songs too: She Cries Your Name, Someone’s Daughter,
Central Reservation, Feel To Believe, Stolen Car to name a few.
Whether it was the
rosy gold warmth of the venue’s decor or the transcendent music, I felt
cocooned in a mellifluous beauty that negated even the hardness of the pews in
the Gallery. Rather more effective than
huddling on the settee with a Lemsip, I feel.
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