It’s only February and already we can hear the hissing of summer lawns. Or maybe it’s applause. Comfort Of Strangers is not Beth Orton’s most radical statement, but it is her most reactionary. The songs may have been recorded in NYC’s Sear Sound studios last spring with Chicago post-rock maestro and Sonic Youth collaborator Jim O’ Rourke at the desk, but the result sounds like nothing either party has ever done. In fact, the feel has far more in common with upstate New York than downtown lofts, a faithful reproduction of the spirit if not sound of Woodstock circa 1970: Bob, The Band, Van and Joni. Rustic, slack and homespun, this is music made of wood and wires.
On previous outings Orton tended to pad her songwriting with flotation tank atmospheres, but here everything’s pared back to the essentials, taut and lean arrangements framing melodies that flash and sparkle like fish in a river.
As with Cat Power on The Greatest, she’s working with autumnal browns and earthenware instrumentation this season. O’ Rourke’s bass lines are warm and valve driven, the drums dampened down, piano patterns spare and tasty. The detail is in the playing rather than the production (and ‘up’ tempos were never rendered as deft or delicate as by percussionist Tim Barnes, an experimental panelbeater who can also play like a Nashville pro, particularly on ‘Rectify’). Bits of melody detach from the main body of song and form a freeflowing flux – a snatch of Coley Jones’s dipso-folk oddity ‘Drunkard’s Special’ in ‘Countenance’, a bit of Van’s ‘Everyone’ or the Velvets’ ‘Sweet Jane’ on the gorgeous ‘Heartland Truckstop’. “I’m your apple-eatin’ heathen,” Orton proclaims in ‘Worms’, her phrasing simplicity itself.
Mind you, she's also a vocal chameleon who can go from Billie’s weeping statue songs to Rickie Lee Jones’ sweetness and sardonicism. More than anything, she’s the most avant-savvy of an unlikely sisterhood that might also include Dido and Natalie Merchant: natural heirs to the northern English sparkling cider voices of June Tabor, Maddy Prior and Sandy Denny. “You go your way, my love, you go your way,” she instructs, stern but not unkindly, on ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’.
Usually I’d peg the forsaking of modernity and all its trappings as creative reargaurd action, a retreat into an imagined and idealised past. But here, it just works. “Some of the time the future comes round to haunt me” Orton sings, in a neat inversion of the norm, on the album’s loveliest tune ‘Conceived’, a cross between Blue and St Dominic’s Preview. Frequently this listener is put in mind of what Aimee Mann was trying for last time out (the bell-bottomed Who shapes of ‘Shopping Trolley’ for instance) or at a push, the brighter, more light-hearted twin of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie’s Master And Everyone. Either way, Comfort Of Strangers is Beth Orton’s strongest set of songs by a (country) mile.
Illustration: Jon Berkley