There's something the Pet Shop Boys say and I'm afraid it's partly true. And that is that over time the records that we consider important do not remain, those with weighty messages, the great works celebrated by critics and enlightened listeners who look down on those with standardized musical tastes. Some remain, it is clear, but above all the pop songs remain. Those are the ones that enter people's lives and say who we are as a community. According to this reasoning, Lives Outgrown by Beth Gibbons is a record of those that don't last. And it's magnificent.
Here's another thing that's not very song-like and not at all pop: Lives Outgrown it's a record about middle age, and therefore about the body that is weakening, about menopause (really), about the prospect of death which at 59 becomes a little more concrete, about the effect of witnessing the death of friends and family . In the lyrics there is the certainty that we are all, her and us, headed towards nowhere, too terrified to feel free, stupid who understand at the last moment that they had to live longer and better. It seems like stuff designed specifically to keep the public away.
Since Gibbons is a rather reserved person (for those who don't know her: it's a euphemism), she hasn't said much about these songs produced with James Ford, one of the architects of the Arctic Monkeys' space lounge and about a thousand other records, including last of the Pet Shop Boys (but you think) and Memento Mori by Depeche Mode (also Lives Outgrown after all it's a bit of a memento mori). However, Gibbons says one thing in a press release and that is that «I realized what life is like without hope. It's a sadness I've never felt. Before I had the chance to change the future, but when you clash with your body you can't force it to do something it doesn't want to do.”
In a world of pre-packaged sounds, Lives Outgrown it has a unique “voice”, a non-replicable folk sound made of stringed instruments that you almost feel like you can touch, choirs that seem to come from the other world, a piano that Ford plays with a spoon and then tupperware, wooden drawers, cans , a paella pan and other things whacked by Talk Talk's Lee Harris. Beats banned. Acoustic and electric timbres are also often elaborate and somewhat disguised in a handcrafted way, not using plug-ins. It's folk one step away from the esoteric, with Middle Eastern influences that add mystery to the mystery and cinematic sound passages like in the second half of Beyond the Sun.
Beth Gibbons is one of pop's last mysteries. She is far from the winning trends of today's music, she communicates little, she rarely releases records. Lives Outgrown it can be considered his first true solo album. It arrives 22 years later Out of Season done in tandem with Rustin Man, pseudonym of Paul Webb of Talk Talk, and five years after the rereading of Górecki's third symphony, a little right (the great composer Krzysztof Penderecki conducting) and a little strange (she is an contralto in a part as a soprano). Given the themes, Lives Outgrown it is his most personal work, as well as the one he worked on the longest, ten years. If in the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs the singer took on the role, among other things, of a mother who mourns her son who died in the war, here she is the middle-aged woman who sees the options dwindling and is forced to accept that not everything will be fine. Sometimes the album seems like the powerful soundtrack to a deathbed scene, sometimes a rustic poem about physical decay, sometimes a collection of existential litanies. In any case, it's stuff you don't hear anywhere else.
Some will say it's a boring album, but that's nonsense. The only boring music is uninteresting music and this instead has its own charm given by the intertwining of the expressive singing and deliberately fragile timbre of Gibbons and the material sound of the instruments. You can sing about fading, suffering, dying and you can do it with grace and mystery. One of the albums of the year. If the Pet Shop Boys are right, a record that won't last.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
