“What has kept me alive is feral invincibility,” Beth Orton wrote in an Instagram post announcing her new album The Ground Above, out June 26 on Partisan. The songwriter unflinchingly stares down life three decades into her career.
By David Harris
“What has kept me alive is feral invincibility,” Beth Orton wrote in an Instagram post announcing her new album The Ground Above, out June 26 on Partisan. “Grief had me say yes to life, to embrace and taste and devour,” Orton wrote later in the note, perhaps best summing up the paradox inherent in her music.
The Ground Above continues the trajectory from Orton’s last record, the career-best Weather Alive (2022). Orton, who began as a folk/trip-hop musician 30 years ago on debut record Trailer Park, has held onto the melancholia of her early music, but largely eschewed the electronic dance beats that defined her work. Instead, Orton leans into the immersive, dreamy sounds of Weather Alive to craft a new album that veers more closely toward late-night jazz clubs than music for the spacey set.
Working again with collaborators Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Shahzad Ismaily (Ceramic Dog) and joined by Nick Hakim and drummer Tom Skinner (the Smile), Orton uses The Ground Above to create weighty songs that deal with both joy and sadness. Beginning with the eight-and-a-half-minute title track, Orton’s craggy vocals are front and center for the record’s duration. “I’m invincible as grief / Violent as a blade of spring released / Ecstatic as a mother’s love / Tearing through the ground to the sky above,” Orton sings, voice perched on the precipice.
Most of The Ground Above’s eight tracks are moody growers where only multiple, deep listens can separate their bounties. Only on the penultimate track, “Love You Right,” does Orton allow her voice to soar. In many ways, it feels like a more appropriate ending to the record than “Otherside,” where Orton sings, “Go and sing out for your freedom / Sing out for your life / Sing out for another day / You get to make it right.” This may feel a bit too much of a pat summation, especially with the better song preceding it.
Orton is more successful in other songs such as standout “Waiting.” Leaning on Christos Stylianides’ tasteful trumpet and Jesse Chandler’s flute, the song finds the singer not waiting idly for life to pass by. Meanwhile, the gentle “Before I Knew,” a song the musician said is about “beliefs so deeply ingrained it’s unclear where they arose from,” feels as fragile as Orton’s brittle voice.
Like Orton’s prior work, The Ground Above traverses some tricky emotional terrain. It’s a record best suited for a chill autumn evening rather than the full-throated warmth of summer. But that shouldn’t stop you from buying it. Spin it now, let it mellow, and when you return to The Ground Above as summer comes to a close, Orton will still be there to embrace you.
Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving, the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau
By Nick Hilton
Melania Trump – born Melanija Knavs – has led an undeniably fascinating life. Raised in the 1970s, in what was then Yugoslavia, she grew up in a state-run housing complex in present-day Slovenia. A teenage modelling contract saw her whisked around Europe and then, in the Nineties, to the United States, where she eventually met the unassuming, mild-mannered property tycoon, Donald Trump. It is a journey that bridges Europe and America, an aspirational story of a little girl with nothing but a perfect jawline; the sort of tale that draws the eye of Hollywood. Of course, this is all information I have extracted from Melania Trump’s Wikipedia page, because it is strikingly absent from the new Amazon documentary, Melania, which has just received a mysterious theatrical release.
Instead, Melania focuses on 20 days running up to the second Trump inauguration in January 2025. “Everyone wants to know,” Melania growls in voiceover, “so here it is.” Perhaps her lack of specificity on what exactly people want to know is deliberate. The documentary – with a runtime of 104 minutes – covers everything from the design of place settings and the width of hat ribbons to her excitement for her son Barron’s hypothetical “beautiful family” and sadness at the 2024 death of her mother. “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my mother,” she laments in the film’s signature voiceover, while the camera holds a shot of the coffin of President Carter. This is American history through the idiosyncratic prism of a woman who is part-puppet of the regime, part-delusional creative, and part-symbol of America’s immigrant community.
“The golden age of America begins right now!” Trump bleats in his inaugural address, while Melania sits behind him, her face twitching unnervingly between pout and smile. Woven through the documentary’s depiction of the events in the run-up to the Trumps’ return to the White House are signs of the film’s strange genesis. Melania’s chief of staff denies a request from Matt Belloni, the entertainment journalist, to hear more about her mysterious Amazon deal. At the banquet dinner on inauguration eve (where guests are served a gold egg and caviar, because, as a sycophantic designer tells the first lady, “white and gold is you!”) viewers will repeatedly spy Amazon proprietor Jeff Bezos alongside other oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook. For the rights to tell this “story”, Amazon paid around $40m, including $28m directly to Mrs Trump. An expensive seat at an expensive table.
But bearing first-person witness to history is a valuable commodity. The reins of the film have been handed to Brett Ratner, the director of Rush Hour and Tower Heist. His career has stalled somewhat after allegations of sexual assault and harassment (which he has denied) were made in 2017 (he also made a recent cameo in the release of select parts of the Epstein files). But just as Trump is getting a second shot at the presidency, so too does Ratner get his second chance. Who is your favourite musician, Ratner (against whom there have been accusations of wrongdoing) asks Melania. She responds with “Michael Jackson” (against whom there have been accusations of wrongdoing), detailing how she met the late singer with her husband (against whom there have been accusations of wrongdoing). Perhaps this is Ratner’s vision for a modern American: a country of forgiveness.
“No matter where [people] come from,” Melania announces during one of her grating voiceovers, “we are bound by the same humanity.” Though she speaks with a thick Slavic drawl, she refers only obliquely to her “country of birth” (Slovenia is referenced, directly, once). A parade of immigrants, including French-born fashion designer Hervé Pierre, appear to reinforce this vaguely cosmopolitan angle. “Opportunities, equality,” says Tham Kannalikham, a designer who moved to the US from Laos aged just two. “It’s really the American dream.” These are the good immigrants serving the Trump administration; a far cry from the ones in cages, the ones tear-gassed on the streets of Minneapolis, the ones festering in a jail cell in El Salvador.
To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a “mother, wife, daughter, friend”, yet is only depicted preening and scowling. Figures like Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan appear to bolster Melania’s geopolitical credentials, yet time and again she returns to banal aphorisms. “Cherish your family and loved ones,” she implores audiences, who were, up until then, neglecting their family and despising their loved ones. Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness. Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving – with the country on the verge of an irreparable schism – the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau, or Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet.
The “film” is part propaganda, sure, and part sop to Big Tech companies who require constant regulatory approval for financial manoeuvrings. Even then, it is bad. It will exist as a striking artefact – like The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will – of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly. Organising plans for his return to the White House at 2am, after the Starlight Ball, Trump announces he will immediately “begin straightening out the nation”. “We’re all very grateful,” his event producer whimpers sycophantically. It is a visceral moment where audiences, around the world, will begin to taste the boot that the American establishment so blithely licks.
Then again, perhaps Melania is merely a piece of post-modern post-entertainment. After all, it is transparently not a documentary. Melania spends most scenes playing a staged version of herself, and shots of the first lady are composed with all the deliberateness Ratner brought to his work on X-Men: The Last Stand. This is somewhere between reality TV and pure fiction. As Donald and Melania waltz on the eve of their victory, a singer blares out: “Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.” Whose truth it is, however, and where it’s going, seems beyond the power of this captured documentary to reveal.
“Angel” feels like walking through a haunted chapel at dawn. HOBBLEDEHOY favorite Cerys Hafana’s harp (the Welsh triple harp which she treats both reverently and rebelliously) is never just accompaniment — it’s a protagonist, whispering secrets, cracking with tension.
“Angel” is less a collection of songs and more a ritual cycle. It’s haunting in the best sense — a folk-myth made audible, where harp strings become conduits for time, loss, and transcendence. It’s not casual listening — but then, the best kinds of music rarely are.
Anne Bancroft’s dignified wife is far more sympathetic in this Mike Nichols masterpiece than Dustin Hoffman’s spoilt rich kid
By Kevin Maher
Are you Team Benjamin or Team Robinson? That’s the question that matters most for an appreciation of this groundbreaking drama, a film that launched the screen career of Dustin Hoffman and made audiences believe that a 36-year-old woman (Anne Bancroft) was at least two decades older than a 30-year-old man (Hoffman) and the mother of a 28-year-old daughter (Katharine Ross).
It’s a testament to the performances and the sly directorial flourishes of Mike Nichols that Hoffman convinces as the 21-year-old ennui-afflicted Benjamin. He floats in his rich parents’ pool to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel while contemplating his desire for Bancroft’s middle-aged Mrs Robinson and the nourishing love he feels for Ross’s ingenuous student Elaine.
The beauty of the film, and of its cultural legacy, is that it somehow refracts evolving attitudes, especially towards societal norms and gender roles. Yes, Benjamin remains a fascinating protagonist, and his belief that all the “wrong people” in Sixties American society are “making the rules” gives him countercultural cachet. But he’s also weak, exploitative and grossly entitled, and he lies to satisfy his sexual appetites. When the critic Roger Ebert reviewed the movie’s rerelease in 1997 he famously called Benjamin “an insufferable creep”.
Conversely, the nominal villain, Mrs Robinson, is now the heroine. Suffering through her marriage with a boorish cigar-smoking husband (the brilliant Murray Hamilton), she’s dignified and elegant yet also conflicted and brutally honest, and is played by Bancroft with the heartbreaking suggestion of so many domestic humiliations sitting just below the surface. In her best scene she hides behind the bedroom door while Benjamin tells Elaine the truth about their affair. Her eyes are sunken, her face ashen and she eventually says, deadpan, “Goodbye Benjamin.” It’s the shot and the performance of the film. The movie belongs to Mrs Robinson. Here’s to you.
★★★★★
Anne Bancroft’s dignified wife is far more sympathetic in this Mike Nichols masterpiece than Dustin Hoffman’s spoilt rich kid