Beth Orton - Kidsticks

The Guardian 80

(Anti)

Twenty years ago, Beth Orton’s breakthrough Trailer Park correctgently dripped tasteful electronics over folky confessionals. Her latest collection, created in California, dives fearlessly into deeper waters. Although dependent on repetition of small riffs, syllables and phrases, these 10 songs are pleasingly unpredictable, uncoiling languorously around layers of synthetic and organic sounds. There’s grit too – the bass-strafed Petals wrestles with itself until its brawling, bawling end, collapsing into the jaunty single 1973. Orton’s alluring vocals decorate rather than dominate, making chilling lyrics like “the phone book is filling up with dead friends” (Falling) even more shocking when they surface. Despite its sunny origins, there’s a shard of ice speared through Kidsticks, a frost that burns fierce as fire.

The Guardian 80

(Anti-)

Back in the 1990s, Beth Orton gained a rep as the comedown queen: her folksy music boasted an electronic edge and her involvement with Heavenly’s dance crew – she collaborated with the Chemical Brothers – ensured that her music could serve as a gentle passage back to reality. Since that heyday she has pursued more traditional singer-songwriter territory, but Kidsticks is a real reinvention: not so much a return to her electronic roots as a bold exploration of fresh territory. A collaboration with Fuck Buttons’ Andrew Hung, this sixth solo album embraces inventive rhythm patterns, tsunamis of synth and, on 1973, the metronomic influence of Kraftwerk. Dawnstar is particularly dreamy, a giant cloud of a song to lose yourself in. Such a radical redesign should be imposing, yet Orton’s vocals – plaintive and soulful as ever – still take centre stage.

Pitchfork 76

Beth Orton has been considered a singer-songwriter folkie for so long that it can be hard to remember that her career began quite differently. She got her start singing on William Orbit's chillout project Strange Cargo, and she lent her voice to two songs on the Chemical Brothers' Exit Planet Dust, placing her smack in the middle of British pop's volatile post-rave milieu. When her 1996 breakout album, Trailer Park, appeared, it balanced plaintive acoustic guitars and barroom piano with trip-hop beats and atmospheric electronic detailing. That unusual fusion had a lot to do with producer Andrew Weatherall, whom Orton hired after he wedded acid house to bluesy psych rock on Primal Scream's Screamadelica. But Trailer Park ended up being an outlier in Orton's catalog. On subsequent albums she progressively dialed back the electronics, and her last full-length, 2012's starkly acoustic Sugaring Season, wrapped itself snugly in the warm, homespun mantle of folksingers like Nick Drake and Sandy Denny.

Kidsticks returns to her electronic roots, but not necessarily in ways that anyone might have expected. Written and produced in Los Angeles with Andrew Hung, of the noisy, psychedelic synth-mashers Fuck Buttons, it often sounds little like anything Orton has done before. The record's sequencing plays up its strangeness, placing its most unexpected songs right up front. “Snow” leads off with caterwauling counterpoints and flanged electric guitars over a trashcan drum corps; “Moon” follows with dance beats and a warbling keyboard melody that's a dead ringer for a sound from David Bowie's “Ashes to Ashes.” Orton, meanwhile, sounds like she's channeling Johnny Cash, lending to the impression that part of the album's genesis may have simply been Orton and Hung swapping the aux cord, constructing a virtual mood board of favorite songs as they sketched out Kidsticks' idiosyncratic sound. That might how the dubstep-inspired bass throb of “Petals” snuck through, not to mention the peppy new wave pastiche of "1973." Fortunately, most of these songs are far more than the sum of their influences: “Petals” may start out sounding like Massive Attack, but by its guitar-and-drum-duel finale, it burns like a church on fire.

It helps that Orton and Hung have enlisted a crack group of musicians, including bassist Bram Inscore, jazz drummer Guillermo E. Brown, percussionist Lucky Paul, and George Lewis, Jr. of Twin Shadow on guitar; Grizzly Bear bassist Chris Taylor also turns up on a couple of songs, and the soundtrack composer Dustin O'Halloran contributes string arrangements to a few more. Their contributions are subtle but key. The rolling “Wave” crests atop a deceptively potent rhythm section and surging wah-wah guitar; “Flesh and Blood” gives her pastoral tendencies a loose, jammy makeover and adds lilting, one-finger synth lines. The scope of her collaborators' resumes—Inscore has played with Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Brown has a long history with David S. Ware and Matthew Shipp's groups, while Paul can be found sitting in with Chilly Gonzales and Mocky—says something about Orton and Hung's approach here: Kidsticks is less a roadmap to a given destination than a net for catching vibes.

As for Orton, loosening up suits her well. You can tell how much she's enjoying herself by all the ways she experiments with her voice. She takes on three or four different styles in “Snow,” alternately cooing and yelping, playing head voice off chest voice. On “Wave,” her delivery frays around the edges, inseparable from the throat that produced it; every crack, every quaver feels like a proud badge of her years on the planet. She's just as physical on “Flesh and Blood,” but here, in contrast, she sounds absolutely luxurious, with a texture like crushed velvet.

Lyrically, the big themes hold sway. She fixates on celestial bodies and planetary forces: suns, moons, stars, seas, smoke, snow, waves, weather. She swims through a liquid sky on "1973"; lilacs turn to teardrops in "Petals." But she also has an ear for small, lovely details, like "corduroy legs running up the stairs," the image that gives shape to “Corduroy Legs,” a delightful, boundless expression of parental love. And if her lyrics sometimes read like the work of someone who's coming off a lost weekend of tarot cards and John Donne, she also knows when to strip back: In “Falling,” she sings, with devastating simplicity, “Now my phone book / Is filling up with dead friends / And I wonder / Who would answer if I called them.”

Throughout it all, a picture emerges of Orton that's anxious, playful (“You got a certain way, I swear, of sticking it in,” she leers on “1973”), and even supremely relatable. There are love songs here, and falling-out-of-love songs, and sometimes it takes a while to tell which is which. The twist in a song called “Falling” is that she's “falling backwards from your arms”; in “Dawnstar,” she sings, “Our love is gaining speed,” but she also admits, “I am thankful that what I have is enough.” Escape velocity is for the young, I think she's saying; once you reach a certain stage in life, you're happy just to keep going. And if this all sounds like a case of lowered expectations, the strikingly beautiful “Flesh and Blood,” the album's peak, turns simple acceptance—of “whatever this is,” as she sings, over and over—into something approaching ecstasy.

Looking back on Trailer Park, Orton told The Quietus in 2009, “I thought, well, if I really am a singer… I must create my own thing and do it, only then will I prove it. But even today I'm still proving it to myself.” But on Kidsticks, she no longer sounds like she has anything left to prove, which is precisely what's allowed her to make the riskiest album of her career. And she sounds like she's had the time of her life making it, too.

Drowned In Sound 70

And how. By the climax of 'Snow', where she intones, over and over, “you are all aglow”, I'd defy you not to be nodding along in agreement, regardless of whether you know what she means. The feeling of joyful wonderment never really seems to let up. As “my tears well up and cry for you” in the outro of 'Petals', a song that in Orton's old guise could have slipped away almost unnoticed becomes a shuddering mass of emotional noise. The drums of Guillermo E. Brown and guitar of Twin Shadow's George Lewis Jr. sweep in on waves of cacophonous yet controlled passion. It shows a tremendous widening in the potential of Orton's range and ability to communicate. Her songs would still work in the hands of an acoustic-toting singer-songwriter but their potency is increased myriad times in these musical surroundings.

'1973' is a bright and breezy, short and sharp pop song. Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor augments 'Wave' with some tasty backing vocal inflexions. The song, again, is a light, almost airy composition. As its 6/8 rolls along, the mix is filled in the mid and higher ranges with synth leads and sweeps which pop in and out to exceedingly pleasing effect. Happily, the chorus “I was crying out for you, before I ever knew, crying out to you, breathe me in” remains the central focus throughout, as the benefit of the vocal recording of Alain Johanes and mixing of David Wrench come to the fore once again. It might seem strange to comment on vocal recorders and mixers, but each track here features subtle changes in the placing of Orton's voice to best give it the tone and colour it needs, in attention to detail which some albums of this type often seem to lack.

As a case in point, 'Dawnstar' has Beth in a more distant, yet more resonant place, as the string arrangements of Dustin O'Halloran (A Winged Victory For the Sullen) make their first incursion. This is a downtempo number, yet with a richly full sonic palette. 'Falling' raises the tempo once again, taking us back into a lighter, seemingly jauntier place. 'Courdroy Legs' is the album's most experimental moment, as an almost spoken Orton vocal fades into the background behind a bed of synths, out of which some beautiful piano from O'Halloran emerges. 'Flesh and Blood' follows, a more strident, up-tempo number, as the pulsing bass of Bram Inscore comes to the fore. As the instrumental closing title-track fades from view it feels like we've seen another, if not new side to Beth Orton and her work, a side which will be new to many.

At times Kidsticks feels a little uneven. Tempos and timbres shift regularly, never allowing the listener to truly settle into one mode, or gain a true sense of what is the coherent sonic voice at the heart of the album. That is, apart from Orton's voice itself, which has never sounded better or more in control. If this is the shape of things to come for her, then we could be in for quite a treat. If only more musicians would be brave enough to truly re-invent themselves.