Lives Outgrown by Beth Gibbons

Thirty years after stepping into the spotlight, the Portishead singer reintroduces herself with her debut solo album. History weighs heavy on her songs, but she takes pains to avoid her musical past.

Beth Gibbons has made inactivity into an art form. In Portishead she sang as if hanging onto the microphone for dear life, her voice the embodiment of languorous misery. Her recorded output since then has arrived at a snail’s pace and her reputation has grown with each fallow year. Following the release of Portishead’s Third, in 2008, Gibbons has performed Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 with the Polish National Radio Symphony, featured on Kendrick Lamar’s “Mother I Sober,” and done precious little else in public. Gibbons does nothing that she doesn’t have to and she does it in her own sweet time, which makes the arrival of Lives Outgrown feel like a revelatory occasion.

So why did Lives Outgrown bring Gibbons out of her shell? And why now? “People started dying,” she said. Three full decades after Portishead first appeared on the scene, she reintroduces herself with an album inspired by goodbyes, informed by the kind of perspective that’s only possible by looking backward. She added, “When you’re young, you never know the endings, you don’t know how it’s going to pan out.” At the heart of Lives Outgrown is a push and pull between past, present, and future, with Gibbons delving into her personal history for inspiration, while studiously avoiding the palette that made Portishead so beloved.

Stylistically, Lives Outgrown approaches folk music, thanks to its acoustic guitars and strings; but it feels denser, louder, and more exploratory, like stumbling across a junkyard deep in the forest. Unusual textures abound: In “Tell Me Who You Are Today,” producer James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco) strikes piano strings with metal spoons; for another track, he and Gibbons spin whirly tubes over their heads, in search of the perfect creepy tone.

Melodies of endless melancholy and lyrics of pointed depth, reminiscent of Gibbons’ work with Portishead and (briefly) Rustin Man, her duo with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, reflect the singer’s period of self-reflection. Lives Outgrown has moments of crushing relatability, as she tackles subjects like motherhood, anxiety, and menopause, her unvarnished humanity a world away from the otherworldly rage she inhabited on Third. “Without control/I’m heading toward a boundary/That divides us/Reminds us,” she sings on “Floating on a Moment,” striking a beautifully sparse rhythm and tone, while the opening couplet of “Ocean” (“I fake in the morning, a stake to relieve/I never noticed the pain I proceed”) distills years of dull suffering into two elegant lines. Her melodies are strong as iron: The elegantly inevitable “Floating on a Moment” and cathartic album closer “Whispering Love” are among the best songs that Gibbons has put her name to.

Gibbons’ voice makes comparisons to Portishead inevitable—and there is, perhaps, a tang of Adrian Utley’s spaghetti western guitar in the opening bars of “Floating on a Moment.” Occasionally, she makes veiled references to her past, with phrases that seem to mirror lines from elsewhere in her catalog. On the whole, though, the singer makes a concerted effort to outrun her musical history. Gibbons said that she wanted to get away from snare drums and breakbeats—both key elements of the Portishead sound—while recording Lives Outgrown, with the drum lines of collaborator Lee Harris (formerly of Talk Talk and a contributor to Gibbons and Rustin Man’s Out of Season) instead hammered out on toms and bass.

This percussive roll is complemented by an inconspicuously cosmopolitan mixture of sounds. Unusual groupings of instruments are packed into devious musical layers, like the viscid concoction of bass clarinet, bass, cello, Farfisa, harmonium, recorders, “fuzz flute,” violin, singing tubes, and bowed saw that is daubed over “Beyond the Sun”. This darkly sylvan stew has little of Portishead’s cinematic high drama; its abstruse angles and woodland heavy metal are closer to Tom Waits’ discordant masterpiece Swordfishtrombones than the clean guitar lines of Out of Season. Gibbons also employs backing vocals for the first time, their sparing use bolstering, rather than radically altering, the album’s makeup, although the children’s choir and wobbly recorder on “Floating on a Moment” and “Beyond the Sun” give the two songs an unsettling air of innocence lost.

The arrangements, largely by Gibbons and Ford, luxuriate in the slightly unreal edge of music once removed. Much of the instrumentation (for example, the sweeping, almost Middle Eastern string lines on “For Sale”) could have been written at any point in the last century, although the rejection of the snare drum’s rebellious crack nudges Lives Outgrown into a parallel universe where rock’n’roll never really took root. Verses are punctuated by wild brass skronk (“Beyond the Sun”) and violins scrape across the percussive surface like nails on a blackboard (“Burden of Life”). These leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight. Lives Outgrown may have taken agonizingly long to arrive, but it bears the mark of more than a decade well spent, a singular talent reborn in surprisingly spiky glory.