Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man

Beth Gibbons came to fame as the vocalist of Portishead but on her solo outing, she uses stark original compositions to explore the organic, often other-worldly acoustic English folk, twisted vocal pop, soundtrack numbers and old jazz styles that first inspired her. Backed by Rustin Man and other members of Talk Talk, this is an elegiac beauty that grows with each listen.

No longer deploying dolor for art points, Gibbons takes her aestheticism up an order of difficulty. From tasteful simplicity to dramatic vibrato to cracked slur to Badu-does-Holiday to "water-coloured memories/Soft as a summer breeze" to precision whisper to country-soul sincerity to loose-whisper-gets-busy to frail-drawl-achieves-grandeur to filtered weirdness to total mannered live bollocks of "Candy Says," she and her hands-on arranger achieve whatever dramatic perspective they map out. But to what end? Gibbons's failure to leave the likes of "And I only hear/Only hear the rain" and "Time is but a memory" in her notebook suggests one limitation of her songcraft. But the selling point for her admirers is the deal breaker for me: a hard-earned refinement that by the nature of its ambition claims more universality than it has any right to. (Grade - B-)