Now-and-then music (6)

Now Music
Comfort of Strangers
Beth Orton
released February 7, 2006
(Astralwerks)

I must admit to never developing a great affection for the work of Beth Orton, and I’m not sure why. I mean, she is an artist whom I should like more than I do, working as she does within genres and using conventions that I otherwise find pleasant and engaging. And yet I’ve never warmed to her. It’s not that I find her music insufferable; on the contrary, it’s the kind of music you can turn on and forget you’re listening, but I can’t imagine that such a back-handed compliment is a true mark of admiration.

Many of the songs on her new collection, Comfort of Strangers, leave me desiring more than their stripped-down musical surfaces offer. On general principles, I enjoy an artist who is comfortable with a spare pop music, and while many of the songs here are produced with a light studio touch, it’s not the production that grates, but the songs themselves. This is essentially a collection of hookless pop music that leaves me as empty as Zen furniture, a music carried along almost wholly by the producer’s subtle ear and Orton’s admittedly beautiful voice, but the songs are thin things, sketches of songs, really, as reviewer Heather Phares noted in her AMG review. But where Phares hears a beautifully plaintive economy of sound, I hear a kind of attenuated song, a song with no beginning, middle, or end, no movement. Instead, Orton's voice floats over and around this emptiness like the desert cry of a banished goddess.

Too often, the lyrics are as unbaked as the music, abounding in quickly shifting (a less kind reviewer might say ‘mixed’) metaphors and never displaying a devotion to the things evoked as anything more than receptacles of vague sentiment.

If you’re a big fan of Beth Orton—and for some reason haven’t listened to Comfort of Strangers—I trust you will be pleased. One must admire her idiosyncratic fusion of divers genres, but I find her music pleasant like winter; after a little taste, enough’s enough.