I'm invincible as grief
Violent as a blade of spring released
Ecstatic as a mother's love
Tearing through the ground to the sky above
We had left her dealing with a record that was anything but immediate, wriggling in the mud of a clear internal desperation, until she chased new possible stimuli and new sounds through a song that was no longer crystalline, but mostly frail, broken, barely sketched out between one verse and another. And we find her again, four years later, in search of an unexpected salvation, in an intimate and even more bloodless work. After all, she herself revealed her ghosts to us, in an interview she gave us a few months ago: “I was sitting at the top of the stairs at home and I was very unhappy. I felt as if I had no bones, as if I didn't exist. I felt as if I could let myself go and fall down the stairs and become like jelly or rubber. I remember that feeling even now that I'm telling this story and it scares me.”
The eight songs contained in “The Ground Above” speak of Beth Orton finally aware of her mood swings, starting with the introductory title tracking: a very sad ballad on the piano, supported by a formidable band that accompanies the English singer-songwriter perpetually on tiptoe. It is a team of instrumentalists who emancipate Orton's style by acting by subtraction: the multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, the pianist Sam Beste of Vernon Spring, the drummers Chris Vatalaro (Antibalas, Radiohead) and Vishal Nayak (Nick Hakim), the trumpeter Christos Styliandes, the guitarist Dave Okumu and the bassist Tom Herbert.
“The Ground Above” is about melancholy and damnation, antidote and poison. It is a succession of emotional contrasts that fuels melodies that are sometimes dark (“Before I Knew”) and elsewhere full of a dim light, but capable of always illuminating, thanks to changes of tone in the chorus that are often as unexpected as they are effective (“Cigarettes Curls”). In this subtle dance, the singer-songwriter from Norwich also opens the doors to jazz godmother solutions, which more than once recall the Paul Anka of the second half of the Seventies, so to speak: the very refined and lovably smoky one of “The Music Man”. It happens, for example, in “Waiting”, while the subsequent “Celestial Lights” brings everything back to dim light, with the session musicians delicately accompanying Orton's broken uvula, as she sings about swamps that meet the river, thus metaphorizing her own fears.
And I'm gonna throw my arms around the world someday
Surrender this weight into the sky
I haven't ever, I haven't ever made it through the night
Without first getting kissed by celestial light
“The Ground Above” clearly exposes a subdued pain, yet vivid and above all to be exorcised without ever raising the tone, to then be distanced in the most emotional sections, such as “Love You Right”, the highest and “emphatic” moment of a very refined album and in which emerges the song, far from the last, of a swan preparing to cross the pond to fly free somewhere between the sea and the stars. An album that gives us a singer-songwriter still in a state of grace, who doesn't care about being liked at any cost, ending up unconsciously finding the best possible version of herself, giving us a songwriting that is apparently modest and somehow full of life.
07/19/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
