In which we cast a cold eye at nineties nostalgia.
[Video][Website]
[4.83]
Katherine St Asaph: Has she heard The Idler Wheel? The comparison’s obnoxious and mostly wrong — Fiona Apple and Beth Orton have little in common besides gender, and if this sounds like anything it’s a lazy cut off Comfort of Strangers. Mostly. There’s one moment, though, that’s striking in the exact same way “Every Single Night” was: when Beth sings “when you feel too much to ever let it show” and when the strings and that ragged-agitated voice prove her wrong. It’s striking, even more for how it breaks the languor. Not enough people will hear it.
[7]
Anthony Easton: There are places where I love the string and piano arrangement, places that seem to have earned it, but between the vocals and the lyrics, little else is earned here.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Because I haven’t kept track of Orton since Central Reservation, I don’t know if piano and strings have formed part of her present sound. Not a bad one either, and her parched, wrecked tones complement the metronomic rhythm. Melodically, though, it’s limp.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: I was going to give it a [6], and then I was going to talk about how I had found her work so much more impressive ten years ago, and was planning to build to the phrase “I was so much older then, I’m etc. etc.” But in the process I listened to it with the ears with which I would have listened to it ten years ago, and however boring my tastes were in 2002 my instincts were good. The downbeat marriage of post-folk rock shuffle with post-cool jazz harmonics, the strings that flutter and overwhelm, even the mannered way she gulps out her melodic phrases, as though fighting to keep from drowning — it’s not necessarily a unique vision, but it’s an honest one, and that counts for a lot.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Big ups to the assembled players for summoning Ardent in Portlandia.
[4]
Josh Langhoff: Beth Orton inspired one of the more entertaining customer reactions during my turn-of-the-millennium music retail days. One of my Brit-pop obsessed coworkers was playing her overhead, probably Central Reservation, and to my ears she was perfectly innocuous, right in line with all their Verve and… um… Inspiral Carpets? Did those guys actually special order Inspiral Carpets just to play them overhead? Anyway, I was busily shifting all the VHS to make room for DVDs when a heavily makeupped middle aged woman, hair tightly coiled, stormed up to me to complain about the overhead music. “She can’t hit her notes directly — listen to how she swoops into them all! HER TONE IS OFFENSIVE TO MY EAR!” And then she stormed out. Her palpable discomfort was rivaled only by the time my manager Melissa started playing Merzbow overhead; you could see a steady stream of people fleeing the section, like forest animals from a fire. Melissa was the coolest. From that point on I’ve somehow avoided hearing any more Beth Orton, so I can’t say if this song’s somnolent pukiness is typical, but I bet she’d be pleased to know she was such a provocateur.
[2]