One of pop’s immutable laws says that at any particular time one artist will define a certain genre in the public consciousness while other, often more talented sorts never approach the same kind of success. Last year it applied to Coldplay, this year — well, you know who it is, and the copyists aren’t going to be pretty. For Beth Orton the mythical beast casting a shadow over her career is Dido Armstrong, the woman who ruined a perfectly good Eminem record.
Glib though that might seem — the Norfolk-born chanteuse would doubtless disavow any comparisons — you can bet that her record company would kill for similar success with this, her fourth proper album. Female singer-songwriters with a vague folk inflection and some experience with dance music producers (Orton has worked with the Chemical Brothers) must work hard to break through.
Comfort of Strangers isn’t remotely artificial and pre-programmed, though. The producer Jim O’Rourke just doesn’t work that way. In fact, the ideal description is probably “woody”, as in “material best performed in a forest glade where hippies gather”. There are plenty of gentle guitar arpeggios, what sounds like a double bass offering accompaniment, and minimal piano parts, which often seem modelled on Nick Drake’s celebrated overdub on Pink Moon.
So the success of Orton’s project depends entirely on the quality of her songs, and they are patchy, too many slipping by unnoticed. The opener, Worms, is little more than a piece of nonsense verse, but in Orton’s lugubrious voice it becomes unsettling. Conceived is an odd choice as the first single, stronger on atmosphere than melody, while Rectify displays the rhythmic tics that will be obvious to anyone familiar with the producer’s previous work.
Far more interesting are the upbeat Shadow of a Doubt, where a chorus actually lifts the song (and the listener’s heart), the deceptively cheery and propulsive Shopping Trolley, and the convincing chant of Heart of Soul, which really should have closed this somewhat overlong record.
But such moments are too few. Always cleverly arranged and performed, this might well be exactly the record its creators intended to make. Which begs the question — why is listening to it such hard work?