Beth Orton’s ninth album, The Ground Above, reads as a climb from darkness toward dawn. Yet its real triumph lies in treating grief and joy as one continuous force.
The title itself hangs the world upside down. Ground belongs underfoot, and Beth Orton lifts it overhead, where the sky should sit. Across the eight long songs of The Ground Above, she keeps running that swap. On the title track she sings of “tearing through the ground to the sky above,” and by its closing minutes the line comes back reversed. “Tearing through the sky to the ground above.”
In other words, “I’m invincible as grief” turns into “I’m invincible as hope.” The verb holds steady while the feeling on either side of it trades places. Which tells you what kind of record this wants to be. A grief album convinced that grief and joy run on the same frequency.
Orton arrives here from 2022’s Weather Alive, the cheap-upright-piano breakthrough that closed a decade of wandering and recast the folktronica pioneer of Trailer Park as a patient bandleader. The Ground Above extends that mode and trusts it further. She self-produces again and gathers the same kind of jazz-literate players—Sam Beste’s Rhodes and piano, Christos Stylianides’s trumpet, Shahzad Ismaily’s bass, Vishal Nayak and Chris Vatalaro splitting the drums—then lets them build the way a band warms up in a half-lit room. You’re meant to find each song while you listen.
That looseness carries a real argument. The eight-and-a-half-minute title track gathers like an orchestra tuning before a downbeat. Stylianides’s trumpet skates across the rhythm section in figures that owe a clear debt to Destroyer’s Kaputt. Where Weather Alive still made room for electronic fidget, Orton trades it here for the live smear of brushed drums, a bassline that pools rather than walks, and piano landing a hair behind the beat.
A packed production.
The whole drift descends from late-period Talk Talk and the jazzier reaches of John Martyn, where a song dilates until its pulse turns into noise. The arrangement on “Before I Knew” thins to a single glowing Rhodes chord and a wash of breath. It’s closer to Eno than to folk. Through all of it, the production keeps softening its own outlines. And that smudging is thematic. When she sings that a kiss “wiped me out like chalk off of a board,” the band performs the same erasure.
Listen closely and a stranger pattern surfaces. Across the record, knowing always happens late. “Before I Knew” turns on the phrase “I’ve been here before I knew how.” “Waiting” lands its sharpest blow gently—”I’ve been waiting ’till forever had come / Before I knew it, it had already come and gone.” In “Cigarette Curls,” time “caught up with me eventually.” Then “moves faster than the pain.”
Orton builds a narrator who feels first and understands afterward. Forever a step behind her own sensations. That design reframes the one quality that some might treat as a flaw to overlook. Some may call Orton’s weathered voice half-legible. But it moves the listener anyway. Because causality can be exactly backward. A record can be about the feeling of outrunning language. Language that wants a voice you absorb a beat before you decode it.
The album’s finest writing.
“I’ll Miss You” makes the case plainest, and it doubles as the album’s finest writing. Over a near-spoken cadence, Orton offers two of her cleanest images—”the moon a crumpled paper bag / the sun a rusted can”—then lets the song dissolve the self entirely, slipping from a lover she addresses to one she watches from across a room. Grief smears the border between presence and absence the way the production smears everything else. The song earns its ache through that confusion. And because of it.
Many listeners may quote “love is the only certainty there is” as the album’s thesis. But the sharper line arguably sits two verses earlier, in that chalk image. Where knowing her fully and wiping her clean arrive in one stroke. The cost of Orton’s method surfaces when she spells things out instead.
“Otherside” closes the record on its most explicit upswing—live strings, fattened horns, “I sing out for my freedom” delivered straight—and the directness, welcome as it is, names aloud what the chalk left productively smudged.
The bottom line.
The whole album works by holding comprehension a half-second past reach. The finale simply hands it over. A few midtempo stretches court the opposite risk, where the devotion to drift levels the contour between songs until they share one mood. The belief that grief and joy weigh the same can. At the wrong moment, they make everything weigh the same.
Still, that evenness mostly reads as conviction. The tidy summary of The Ground Above—dark night of the soul, then sunrise—mistakes a swap for an arc. Her loveliest move comes when the erasure turns generous. “Let it wipe me out” slides into “let it wipe you out.” It’s intimacy she passes hand to hand like a lit match. This plays less as a record about surviving loss than as one that treats loss and love as a single climate to dwell. And its half-erased surfaces hold the truest thing it knows.
“The Ground Above” is available now.
Images courtesy of Partisan Records.
REVIEW RATING
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'The Ground Above' - Beth Orton - 8/10
8/10
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
