“The Ground Above” is Beth Orton's new release

Beth Orton continues to oscillate between electronic and acoustic poles collaborating with the producers Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, Rosanne Cash) and Andrew Hung (Fuck Buttons). Her eighth album, Weather Alive (2022) sparked by the purchase of a cheap upright piano, marked a decisive shift: Orton moved to keyboards, took over production herself, and opened up an entirely new sonic vista. It was an artistic breakthrough.

The Ground Above is effectively its sequel. On the beautifully drowsy, starry-eyed "Celestial Light," built on tom-tom patter and meandering piano, there are distant echoes of The Blue Nile — unlike "Friday Night" on Weather Alive, which was a more direct homage to the Scottish trio.

 

As producer, Orton marshals a small platoon of top-tier musicians: The Smile's Tom Skinner on drums, The Invisible's Tom Herbert on bass, The Bees' Paul Butler handling horn, woodwind and string arrangements, plus guests including Portishead's Adrian Utley and Nick Hakim. On "Cigarette Curls," Utley's fractured guitar solo in the coda gives way to Hakim's haunting one-man choir. Time has also transformed Orton's voice. Now vaporous and tremulous, weathered and cracked in places, it has become a genuinely soulful instrument.

If Weather Alive confronted grief and chronic illness — Orton has long lived with Crohn's disease and has suffered seizures — its successor is steeped in nostalgia. She drifts through distant memories of hitchhiking and "dancing in the full beam light," and conjures vivid present-tense portraits, like the friend in "Cigarette Curls" with "a laugh that comes right out of the dirt." "Time caught up with me, eventually," she reflects over its hypnotic, downtempo soul groove.

Elsewhere, the laid-back Motown pulse of "Waiting" — one of Orton's catchiest songs to date — charts an escape from a doom-loop of fear. Closer "Otherside" moves from darkness into light, building to a hopeful finale — "Tell me you made it through alive" — that sits halfway between "Hey Jude" and The Beta Band's "Dry The Rain." 
Ultimately, The Ground Above consolidates Orton's creative resurgence. It is a more mature kind of comedown — one shaped by midlife epiphanies and a hard-won resilience.