Beth Gibbons closed Portishead‘s last album, Third (2011), in a dramatic fashion. Towards the end of the final song, “Threads”, Gibbons, with a tortured vibrato, repeatedly characterizes herself as tired, worn, and aimless, yelping with an energy that belies the words or will prove to be a last gasp. As Gibbons’ voice fades into silence, guitarist Adrian Utley performs a kind of alarm that warns of something dangerous and is ominous and threatening on its own. Geoff Barrow uses sounds of a similar timbre and function in his film soundtracks.
“Threads” leaves the listener hanging, waiting for the object of that alarm and Portishead’s next act. In a sense, listeners are still waiting, as they have not released another album since then. A 2016 cover of ABBA‘s “SOS” extended the impression that Portishead were warning us, sapping that song’s upbeat rhythm and replacing its instrumental melodies with a tense soundscape. The music video, featuring only Gibbons, pointed to the direction the singer would follow in subsequent years. The clip ends with a dedication in the form of a quotation by murdered politician Jo Cox, spoken initially in her maiden speech: “We… have far more in common than that which divides us.”
Gibbons’ new album Lives Outgrown faces the coming of death and its inescapability, a reality we all share. For Gibbons as a solo artist, 2019’s live collaboration with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) mined the melancholy majesty of that death-saturated piece. Lives Outgrown, then, seems like an outgrowth of where Gibbons’ mind and talents have taken her in the past decade, which is to ruminate on how life is a vapor.
Beth Gibbons’ first solo album, Out of Season (2002), was a stylistic curveball for anyone who pigeonholed the artist within the vaguely defined trip-hop genre. Another surprise on that record (made in conjunction with Rustin Man) was how optimistic the singer occasionally sounded, never more so than on the first song, “Mysteries”. With the opening lyrics, Gibbons crystallizes ephemeral beauty: “God knows how I adore life / When the wind turns on the shores lies another day / I cannot ask for more.” Though the entire album did not sustain that mood, Out of Season revealed additional layers of Gibbons’ perspective (creative and otherwise) that were previously hard to come by given her absence from the press, despite being the singer of a famous band.
Lives Outgrown, focusing on life’s ticking clock, resumes the folk stylings of Out of Season but with some significant changes in instrumentation and production. “Tell Me Who You Are Today” is cleverly mixed so that Gibbons’ voice appears to call and respond to itself and emerge from different spaces. Her acoustic guitar and the string arrangement, here and in other songs like “Burden of Life”, are redolent of A Moon Shaped Pool-era Radiohead, a band Portishead and its members have always been in something of a conversation with, even if that exchange was mostly in mutual artistic influence.
“Floating on a Moment” was an obvious choice for Lives Outgrown‘s first single. It has one of the most memorable choruses on the record and backing vocals that complement Gibbons’ emotional arc of realizing how important it is to appreciate the here and now. This perspective of the lyrics also makes the song a successor to “Mysteries”.
James Ford’s many contributions to the album include the various guitars he plays on “For Sale”, a highlight of the back half that breaks up some of the creeping monotony of Lives Outgrown. On the same song, Raven Bush’s violin solo further distinguishes it from the adorning way the strings are used elsewhere on the album. Ford’s work on more than a dozen instruments in “Beyond the Sun” combines styles and sounds that do not necessarily work on paper but provide Lives Outgrown with its most musically exciting song, which incorporates free jazz flourishes with Lee Harris’s drum groove.
“Lost Changes”, one of the longer tracks on Lives Outgrown, is plainly the prettiest song on the record and one whose lyrics are the most overt on the subject of ephemerality: “We took on a feeling / A moment / A gleaming.” The real pleasures of “Lost Changes” occur more than a couple of minutes in, as a compelling transition into a bridge introduces a different energy and then a higher vocal register for Gibbons. “Rewind” contrasts with the ornate “Lost Changes”, bearing a more abrasive sound, busy percussion, and vocal effects that would be at home on Third.
A noteworthy feature of “Rewind” is the recording of children playing outside that appears in the final minutes, bringing to mind a similar recording from Jeff Bridges’ Sleeping Tapes (2015). The last song on Lives Outgrown, “Whispering Love”, includes another field recording, this time of animals in the outdoors. If the question Gibbons ponders on Lives Outgrown is how to harness (and enjoy) a fleeting life, then an answer emerges that, while not a cure-all, has effects that should not be overlooked: spend more time in nature.