Lives Outgrown

Lives Outgrown reveals Gibbons' music is only getting richer as the years pass.

Lives Outgrown presents an artist whose capabilities have been sharply honed, with the skill to convey all of life’s complicated, thorny emotions.

Timeless and considered, Lives Outgrown is a complete, but still complicated, portrait of the intersection of grief and life. [Jun 2024, p.50]

Lives Outgrown is a quite different prospect to Gibbons' previous work - more intimate, more personal, coloured by the grief and goodbyes se has weathered in recent years. But it is still possible to find a thread that runs from here to Out Of Season, and back to Portishead. [Jun 2024, p.23]

Often feeling like a more wistful variant of Gibbons’ main band – Portishead – the album’s philosophies seem to live within every second, as every moment gives birth to a new musical idea, a new shade of muted colour that expresses the soul’s struggle with loss.

Though there’s no question that this is a wrenching record, Gibbons and co-producer James Ford have rendered a three-dimensional listening experience that is as immersive as it is forbidding.

Lives Outgrown is a quiet folk album, but there are elements of the carnivalesque and the sublime.

These are decidedly intimate songs approached from remarkably wide angles, woodsy tapestries penetrated with modernist psychedelic touches (whirly tubes, piano strings struck with metal spoons), artfully woven into grand, sprawling arrangements that will reward repeated private listening perhaps even more than Portishead has.

Lives Outgrown, focusing on life’s ticking clock, resumes the folk stylings of Out of Season but with some significant changes in instrumentation and production. “Tell Me Who You Are Today” is cleverly mixed so that Gibbons’ voice appears to call and respond to itself and emerge from different spaces. Her acoustic guitar and the string arrangement, here and in other songs like “Burden of Life”, are redolent of A Moon Shaped Pool-era Radiohead.

By design, Lives Outgrown does not have the danceable grooves of Portishead’s music, but fans of the more experimental aspects of Gibbons’s former band should love the album. The orchestral compositions and atmospheric tension paint bleak portraits well-suited for Gibbons’s somber voice. That voice is as good as ever, able to wring drama from each utterance of her poetic tales of loss.

Lives Outgrown is a collection that will make you feel small, such is its world view and acknowledgement of the natural world’s—and time’s—brutal indifference to human suffering. But Gibbons is a survivor and advocate, and this album is alive—musically, lyrically.

Unlike her 2002 album with Rustin’ Man, Out of Season, she doesn’t turn to the swoop of jazz to impart longing, either. The woody timbres here are most often those of folk, but this is a modern, free ancientness that swings and tumbles (Reaching Out); on For Sale, Raven Bush’s violin looks eastwards.

Leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight.

On “Lives Outgrown,” Gibbons has matured without becoming complacent.

Throughout, Gibbons and her collaborators maintain a needling sense of unease that, when punctured, allows for fabulous melodic blowouts.

It may not be as, well, iconic as Portishead’s Dummy, but there are moments on Lives Outgrown that certainly stand shoulder to shoulder with Beth Gibbons’ glory days.

From the John Barry-esque orchestration of Reaching Out, to Talk Talk’s Lee Harris’s febrile percussion on Rewind, the album is full of richly detailed arrangements that allow Gibbons to free herself from the pull of Portishead’s past.

If that all sounds bleak, it is. Yet Lives Outgrown is also very beautiful. [Jun 2024, p.80]

One suspects Gibbons agonised over every word and note on Lives Outgrown, but the result is an album to fall deeply in love with. If you allow them to, these songs will envelope your soul.