Beth Orton sings “Weather Alive,” the title track off her first album in six years, like she’s summoning a spirit. Her voice sounds broken and determined, cresting in a chorus that flows with the emotional cadence of an old soul song: “Almost makes me want to cry/The weather’s so beautiful outside,” she sings, blending the words together to communicate their message with her delivery alone. Her accompanists—jazz musicians Alabaster dePlume, Tom Skinner, Shahzad Ismaily, and Tom Herbert—follow her lead, setting the mood with a slow-burning drone, textured with Talk Talk’s dying-fire sparks of electric guitar and the swelling smoke rings of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. As the music rises against the ragged pulse of her vocals, the English artist, nearly 30 years into her career, constructs an entirely new landscape for her songwriting—a wide-open space that grows stranger and more beautiful the further inside she leads us.
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