Beth Orton's 'The Ground Above' Lands Today, Self-Produced Again, With the Band From 'Weather Alive'

Beth Orton put out her ninth album, The Ground Above, today on Partisan. She produced it herself, the second time she has done that, and she did it with most of the same band that made 2022's Weather Alive: Tom Skinner of The Smile on drums, Shahzad Ismaily on bass and whatever else was in reach, Tom Herbert holding the low end on the tracks Ismaily sits out. Eight songs. Two of them, the title track and "Waiting," have been out since spring, so this is not a cold open. The record was tracked largely live to the floor, which is an odd choice for music this hazy and electronic, and you can hear the choice paying off.

Thirty years from the desert

It has been three decades since "She Cries Your Name" introduced most people to Beth Orton, and that song dragged a few labels behind it that never quite let go. "Folktronica," for one, coined more or less to explain what a folk singer was doing trading takes with William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers. And a visual: the Mojave, where she shot that 1996 video and where she returned in 2016 for "1973," that second trip ending in a mess of online anger after she spray-painted federally protected Joshua trees for the shoot.

You can draw a line from Trailer Park and Central Reservation straight through to here, but the more useful line is shorter. Weather Alive was the reset. Orton taught herself to produce, bought a battered upright piano, and made a record that floated instead of strummed. The Ground Above is the sister record to that one, and Far Out's Andrew Clayman framed the arc well: she is still walking the same arid land, only this time she is marveling at what grows there instead of tearing anything up.

What it sounds like

The title track tells you the temperature. Roughly thirty seconds of plonking piano and backwards, swirling organ, and then Orton steps up close to the mic and delivers the opening like she ran to get there: "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." It runs eight minutes. Dave Okumu's reversed guitar trickles in under her Rhodes, the thing builds toward a kiss and then declines to resolve, which is the whole point. Orton has said the song came from the idea that love and grief are "intrinsically linked," that "we are all vulnerable beings living out an invincible existence." On the page that reads like a fridge magnet. In the song it does not, because she sells it slowly and lets the band breathe around it.

The first three tracks all run long, around seven minutes each, and they live in the same misty register: trumpet from Christos Stylianides brushing against Adrian Utley's guitar on "Before I Knew," that Lambchop-at-midnight, Daniel Lanois kind of weather. It is gorgeous and it asks for patience, and if the record had stayed there it would be a lovely thing you admire from a distance.

It does not stay there. "Waiting" is where The Ground Above turns into a different and better album. It opens like it is going to be a piano ballad and then a Stax-shaped arrangement walks in, organ and flute and a real backbeat, and Orton stops floating and starts singing like a soul singer who has been hiding in plain sight for thirty years. Far Out's reviewer reached for Cat Power's The Greatest and the comparison is right: there is some Otis in the phrasing, some Nina Simone in the way she lets the line fall where it wants. It is the standout, and it is not close.

From there the back half loosens up and speeds up. "Cigarette Curls" rides a live rhythm section with Mauro Refosco on congas and three electric guitarists taking turns, Nick Hakim curling harmonies up over the top. The closer, "Otherside," is the big swing, gospel-tinted and built for a "Hey Jude" lift, Orton hitting her largest notes of the record on a chorus that sounds nervous written down and comes out sounding sure: "Tell me you made it through the night / Tell me you made it out alive." She has said the song started from a fact about birds, that the first song at dawn is how they announce they survived the night. That is the album in one image. It opens in grief and ends with something alive and unbothered about naming itself.

The take

The early reviews are landing in a tight band. Album of the Year has it at 76 across its first half-dozen critics, Brooklyn Vegan made it Album of the Week, Our Culture and Far Out both gave it four out of five. I would put it in the same neighborhood and for the same reason most of them are circling: the back half. The opening stretch is beautiful and a little becalmed, three long mood pieces that reward a quiet room and a second listen but never quite grab you by the collar. The moment "Waiting" hits, the record finds its body, and the soul turn it has been hinting at since Weather Alive finally arrives in full.

If there is a knock, it is the sequencing. Putting the three slowest, longest songs up front is a confident move that costs the album some momentum it has to earn back. But this is a small complaint about a record that knows exactly what it is. Orton spent four years and taught herself a new job to make Weather Alive. The Ground Above is the sound of her no longer needing to think about it, of a singer who stopped chasing the pop thing decades ago and circled all the way back to the most direct music of her career. The desert record became a garden record. She planted her feet and grew.