Daybreaker

When things get too straight I can’t bear it – I feel stuck, stuck on a pin.

So soothsaid Iggy on ‘Some Weird Sin’, and while Dr Osterberg wasn’t running a diagnostic on the climate of planet pop, I second that emotion.

It’s a bad time to be selling Beth Orton. Pop-art practitioners are staying strictly behind all sexual, racial and stylistic lines; the bearded ladies, hermaphrodites, androgynes and Elizabethan misfits have all been cast out of Mega-Mega City No. 1 to roam the cursed earth. Like the bullet-mutilated model in Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, such human oddities can only walk the culture catwalks behind a veil.

Surf the surfaces: it’s all straight and narrow. Today’s chart menu offers only two varieties of airplane food, chicken or beef: baby jailbait peddling pederast fantasies and be-my-valentine fallacies; or Creed and Nickelback’s Wella metal. Any record that affronts such homogeneity – Björk’s Vespertine for example, or Anita Lane’s Sex O’ Clock or Garbage’s beautifulgarbage – gets its airplay oxygen shut off. Even Prince or Bowie at the top of their game could not squeeze through the cracks in current vacuum-packed media formats. You could call it a conspiracy except conspiracies are cannier and more complex.

Wayne/Jayne County, where are you now when we need you?

But still, there’s always Beth. Against the backdrop sketched in the preceding paragraphs, only a wanton idealist could figure her for a chartbreaker, but that’s okay, she belongs in the grey areas, shooting off the odd wry line like, “Ain’t nothing very funny bout a man making money off a blonde-haired blue-eyed girl” (‘Carmella’).

Mind you, she’s not always as audacious as I like, so I’m arriving late to this party, having heard Trailer Park and Central Reservation on late night radio rather than at home. Still, I always dug her disregard for niche market etiquette by flaunting both chill-out and nu-folk conventions. Via allegiances to both Terry Callier and William Orbit, she’s one of the few singers around capable of bridging the two Maddys – Ciccone and Prior.

So, Daybreaker could be renamed Eclectic Ladyland, uniting as it does the Chemicals, Johnny Marr, Emmylou Harris, Victor Van Vugt and that charmed charlatan Ryan Adams.

The surprise is that the seams don’t show, although it’s funny how easily you find yourself slipping into the ways of the heathen. On initial spins, this listener found himself thumping the table and hollering, “Where’s the single?!!”, but Orton’s melodies contain slow-release endorphins rather than the instant caffeine hit. Even the single ‘Concrete Sky’, while endowed with a chorus like air freshener, is evasive rather than persuasive. Thus, Daybreaker takes effect only after repeated administrations, peaking somewhere between fourth and fifth listen when you can register such details as the following:

• The way ‘Paris Train’ shows off Orton’s range and writerly eye over strings and kettledrums like Portishead without the painstakingly self-generated samples.

• The aforementioned ‘Carmella’, which could be Gillian Welch up there in the north of England.

• The way she slides those notes like a lovely sort of pain over the electhrob of the title tune.

• The grace with which Emmylou Harris shadows the line “He’s my man and I’ve been doing him wrong” in ‘God Song’.

• Orbit’s mix of ‘Thinking About Tomorrow’, conjuring Floaters’ strings over Lou Reed’s streetwalker shuffle.

Regrets, I have a few. I could live without Ryan Adams’s ‘This One’s Gonna Bruise’, which is maudlin in the way that, I dunno, Clifford T. Ward or someone is maudlin. And occasionally the record cries out for more space and you wish she’d deploy those pipes over an ambient wash rather than standard songwriter shapes – but then maybe I’m just wanting her to be Mary Margaret O’Hara when Lucinda Williams works as well, only on a less astral plane.

Either way, Daybreaker exudes the contemplative satisfaction of a consolidating move rather than the excitement of an endgame. It won’t disappoint the faithful, nor will it depose Astral Weeks off those abominable Best Of All Time Ever lists.