SPIN

Review: Beth Orton Demands Your Attention on ‘The Ground Above’

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“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.  

Source: Beth Orton Demands Your Attention on ‘The Ground Above’ – SPIN

Let It Bleed: The Oral History of PJ Harvey’s ‘Rid of Me’ 

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PJ Harvey has a walloping, 50-foot-tall legacy — musicially and emotionally raw when stadium angst was a boys club; opening the door for everyone from Alanis to Karen O. But in 1993, PJ Harvey was the name of a band: bassist Steve Vaughan, drummer Rob Ellis, and frontwoman Polly Jean Harvey, who would soon after come to be known as “PJ Harvey” regardless of whom she played with. Rid of Me was their second album, coming on the heels of their stark, remarkable 1992 debut, Dry, which had launched the trio from their modest beginnings playing forgettable gigs around England’s West Country (including one where they were famously paid to stop playing) into a major-label bidding war (won by Island Records) and on to an international stage.

A howling smash-up of blues, punk, and Beefheartian avant-garde stomp, Rid of Me felt like an expression of pure, unadulterated id — albeit an id with defiant post-feminist ideals and a sneaky sense of humor. Many heard the embittered snarl of the title track or the unhinged and anarchic “Legs” as autobiographical soundtracks to the nervous breakdown Harvey supposedly had during the album’s conception, but that sold her short as a writer. Rid of Mespawned no breakaway radio hits and garnered minimal MTV play, but tracks like the frenetic, thrashing “50 Ft. Queenie” and the harrowing howler, “Man-Size,” made quite an impact nonetheless — SPIN named it the fourth best album of 1993 and put her on the cover two years later.

 

In the album’s wake, Courtney Love said, “The one rock star that makes me know I’m shit is Polly Harvey. I’m nothing next to the purity that she experiences.” Similar accolades poured in from everyone from Kurt Cobain and Elvis Costello to Madonna and Jon Bon Jovi. Despite the widespread critical acclaim, Steve Albini, who recorded most of the album with the band at Pachyderm Studios outside Minneapolis, came in for his fair share of criticism for, among other things, the album’s rawer-than-raw sound and the walls of noise that sometimes obscured Harvey’s vocals. The controversy only seemed to gild the album’s legend, though, and with time it has become a definitive document of the 1990s.

SPIN spoke to Rid of Me’s primary architects to get the fraught story behind the album’s creation, and chronicle its messy aftermath.

Polly Jean Harvey, vocals/guitar: I’d done a foundation course in art school and was going to do a degree in sculpture, but instead of doing that, I’d signed a record deal and deferred my place. After making Dry, I thought, “I’ll make one more record.” Then I thought people will probably get bored of me. So I deferred my college course again to write Rid of Me.

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