Beth Gibbons Sets Cycles of Grief Aglow on the Perfect, Anchoring Lives Outgrown

At the end of “Threads,” the final song on Portishead’s last album, Third, vocalist and lyricist Beth Gibbons asked one last question of her listeners: “Tired, worn, where do I go?” 16 years later, it’s clear where she went. But let’s circle back. Gibbons, ever the spectral, enchanting voice at the center of Portishead’s three studio albums, hasn’t remained entirely dormant for the last decade and change. In 2013, she signed with Domino Records and announced that she’d be releasing a solo album soon, but nothing of that ever came. Instead, in 2019, she put out a recording of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs that she’d made with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and was conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki. Three years later, she appeared on the song “Mother I Sober” from Kendrick Lamar’s album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, for which her featured writing credit scored her an Album of the Year nomination.

Gibbons is a unique figure in the alternative and experimental music canon, if only for how little of her we’ve had access to over the last 30 years. Like Judee Sill, Lauryn Hill and Nick Drake, her catalog is minimal but her impact is immeasurable. The work she did with Portishead in the 1990s, namely on Dummy and the band’s self-titled second LP, became landmark entries in the trip-hop genre that was emerging in England at the time. With Geoff Barrow’s groundbreaking instrumentation centering the project, it allowed Gibbons’ voice to be as angelic as it was razor-sharp—she was able to bend notes at will, becoming humid, atmospheric and hazy at different intervals, all mesmerizingly so. Like Adrian Utley’s menacing guitar riffs on a song like “Glory Box,” Portishead got its kicks by riffing on a fabled musical world stationed someplace in-between a spy movie, noise show and DJ set.

But it was on Third where Portishead and Gibbons unveiled their chameleonic sensibilities—morphing, in real time, into a psych- and folk-rock band that let its own progressions tumble into muscular electronica fit with cathartic, droning beats and shocking guitar tones. Gone were the turntable scratchings of their previous projects, as the beloved Bristol trio dared to embrace their own krautrock inclinations in the name of redefining the brand they’d made a cornerstone of a multi-hyphenated English music scene. On Third, Gibbons sounded more tortured, kinetic and frantic than ever; the multitudes of her generational lilt piercing through the claustrophobia of Barrow’s arrangements. And, for 11 years, that was the last we’d heard from her.

Now, her question of “Where do I go?” seems to have its answer. “If I could change the way I feel, if I could make my body heal,” Gibbons sings at the genesis of her new album, Lives Outgrown. “Free from all I hear inside, all brought forward from my hand.” Lives Outgrown is, by technical measure, her debut solo album—though she did release a studio album, Out of Season, in 2002, albeit in collaboration with Talk Talk bassist Rustin Man (or Paul Webb, if you know him personally). And by that technical measure, it is the best debut album to hit the shelves since Ctrl seven years ago—perhaps even as far back as Madvillainy in 2004. Take that appraisal with a grain of salt, however, as few artists can claim they were a crucial fixture in a band like Portishead, whose own debut album was one of the best projects of the 1990s.

That doesn’t diminish Gibbons’ turn here. In fact, it only validates just how singular Lives Outgrown is. It sounds nothing like Dummy, Portishead or Third sonically, instead brandishing the same kind of experimental flourishes that all of those aforementioned albums spun into gold all while nurturing the folk sounds of Out of Control to a dependable extreme. But even then, Gibbons would be remiss to just make a folk album. With orchestral fractures and guitar plucks that are languid and patiently pronounced, the songs of Lives Outgrown sound as ornate as they do menacing. “Come over here, listen to me,” Gibbons quakes on opening track “Tell Me Who You Are Today.” Producer James Ford hits the piano strings with metal spoons. Later on the album, he and Gibbons will channel a foreboding energy by spinning whirly tubes above their heads. The remaining nine tracks each make for a beacon of unflinching vulnerability, piercing through Earth’s most burdensome fits of mortality. It’s a coming-of-middle-age siren, 10 chapters dressed in unorthodox ways that encapsulate a humanly portrayal of maternity in precious, fragmented and awing stretches. In Gibbons’ own words, it’s an album full of “lots of goodbyes.”

If you arrive at Lives Outgrown looking for something that sounds like Portishead, you might find your thirst briefly satiated by “Floating on a Moment”—but it’s only a slight parallel. The song is melancholic yet enchanting, as Gibbons finds herself trapped in a purgatory of middle-age—the prosperous hope of the future suddenly feels dimmer, and retrospect snaps itself back into place with a much less graceful ferocity. “Without control, I’m heading toward a boundary that divides us, reminds us,” she sings. A bassline shudders while a thinly plucked dulcimer sparkles and a rush of toms thud and pulse. With two minutes left to unfurl, a choir of harmonies hum until they explode into a mirage of towering hymns. “All going to nowhere,” they cry out, echoing Gibbons’ words back to her. “It’s not that I don’t want to return,” she confesses. “It just reminds us that all we have is here and now.”

Lives Outgrown achieves a wondrous feat of relatability—even if what inspired these songs are not universal feelings. Gibbons’ splendor is her innate ability to make our own experiences feel denser and louder. When she sings about the timing never being right “when you’re losing a soul” on “Burden of Life,” anyone who has confronted the monstrous clamors of grief may feel it deeply. Gibbons likens her response to lostness to pebbles holding court on a shoreside, to understanding why generations dwindle. “I used to feel the feelings,” she admits, over the strums of her own acoustic guitar and Lee Harris’ percussive thrums. “Love that I once said I’d never rile.” “Burden of Life,” which sits on the tracklist between two singles, aches itself into a symphony that gashes and strains. The cello, violin and viola strings are frightening as they screech, only to fade delicately into a farfisa and harmonium outro. The daunting, emotive arrangement mirrors the daunting realities of getting older and losing loved ones.

Many songs on Lives Outgrown begin with Gibbons’ six-string and her vocals, and “Lost Changes” is no different—changing from a folk song into an elemental, colossal skyscraper of solinas, recorders, flutes, strings, five guitars and whistling. The song is life advice from Gibbons disguised as a solemn lament, directed at a child, a partner, a friend, herself or no one in particular. “Hey, you, over there,” she signals. “Don’t pretend you’re unaware—realize the tenderness, appreciate the sweet caress ‘cause, honestly, love changes, things change.” Like how Third was full of beat-switches and stringed sequiturs, Lives Outgrown revels in tonal shifts that color slowly. The emotional bandwidth of a song like “Lost Changes” sounds like gospel. Some might categorize that as “chamber pop,” but Gibbons’ forlorn vocals are much more self-gravitational than that of a bellowing ensemble. “All that I want you to want me the way that you used to. All that I want is to love you the way that I used to,” she sings, sending “Glory Box” transmissions into her own musical lineage.

Beth Gibbons’ first solo record is embroidered with raw, cherished instrumentation that duets with open spaces. It is sometimes beautiful, sometimes jagged and worrisome. The first minute of “Rewind” is gnarly, as Raven Bush’s violin and viola cut through the windswept, airy background—zagging whenever Gibbons’ vocals zig. “Empty with our possessions and trouble is, we still feel unfed,” she sings. “Hunting her down, sweet mother nature, ‘til nothing left if this goes on. And the wild has no more to give, makes no sense. This place is out of control and we all know what’s coming.” As the midpoint for Lives Outgrown, “Rewind” is cataclysmically resound. Ford employs destitute levels of droning feedback beneath a pile of acoustic and baritone guitars, and the inaudible sounds of children playing begin to linger in vignettes. It’s a breakdown that will turn your bones inside out, a resolution of a simple, well-worn truth: We can only go forward.

“Reaching Out” is the “poppiest” song on the record, if you can even validate it as such—as Gibbons’ idea of pop music is something far more chaotic and stacked. Rather than drown the arrangements with bubblegum tonics, Ford finds instrumental resolve in everything from a Chinese lute to a marching snare to a bass clarinet. He and Gibbons call upon Howard Jacobs to play bass and tenor sax, both of which skitter in unison like suspects in a noir spoof—a sequence aptly fit for a Portishead record but resurrected on Lives Outgrown as a vessel that unifies treasures of loss. Jacobs’ woodwind constructions speak fluidly, glitching and marauding like lines on a lie-detector test or like a death march across some ancient, bygone yesteryear. Gibbons’ lyricism, too, is poetic in an almost medieval way, as she blisters her verses with revelatory familiarities and, sometimes, intentionally exiles the subjects. “Where’s the love gone, where’s the feeling, where’s the belief in the words we’re breathing,” she sings. “Why do wander away from me?”