It's great to wake up on a Friday morning looking forward to your 8.15 class with Business People from a Pet Food provider in Kreveld, Germany and with a fantastic new record to accompany your ablutions and breakfast rituals as you make your way towards it.
This morning Beth Gibbons and her debut album Lives Outgrown. Anyone vaguely familiar with Beth and her work down the years with Portishead will have the vaguest idea of what to expect here. But all expectations are immediately outstripped. This instantly forwards itself as one of the best, and certainly one of the most haunting records you are likely to hear all year. Any other year for that matter.
Beth Gibbons is not necessarily the happiest of campers. She never has been frankly. More like a prophetess of impending doom. Don't go to Lives Outgrown hoping for covers of Wake Me Up Before You Go Go and the like.Cheerful is not necessarily the go to adjective. If that's what you're after I direct you to.... well Wake Me Up Before You Go Go might be a place to start.
Instead you get a series of siren songs that bring to mind the German concept of the unheimlich. The uncanny, a philosophical idea that is difficult to explain completely but essentially gets to the root of what makes us human and unites us with the fantastic and spectral existence of the planet we find ourselves cast adrift on. The very reason why we're alive and wake to each new day with renewed hunger for it.
Perhaps I haven't described the record very well. It has all sorts going for it. Ritual, ceremony, drama, tunes. It's an album apart and I haven't even listened to it all the way through yet. Auf jeden falle total toll. Forwarts und aufwarts.
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