Beth Orton – Weather Alive review

Given the many different elements that go into creating contemporary music – writers, musicians, producers, software – it’s unusual to find a single instrument from which most of a record’s identity springs. But the battered piano on which Weather Alive was conceived eventually also came to embody a career rebirth for Beth Orton, who bought it at a second hand market and in the process of saving it from likely destruction did much the same thing for herself.

The album’s roots are in being unceremoniously dropped by her former label and formative experiences with letting other people shape her past work. This time neither having access to much by way of resources or wanting oversight, the material which emerged from a studio shed at the bottom of her garden constitutes her finest collection of songs since 1999’s Mercury-prize winning Central Reservation.

It’s contents are sometimes so biographical it hurts – the outstanding, visceral Lonely scrapes away at the choices and contradictions of modern womanhood – but there are also moments of fragile beauty, no more so than on her tribute to lost friend Andrew Weatherall Fractals and the sparkling closer Unwritten. It seems breathing life into old ivory has left Beth Orton at a thrilling point of no return.

You can read a full review here.