Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man
Out of Season

This album is a breath from the soul.
It may seem like a banal and clichéd comment, but the genuinely heartfelt flavor of the interpretations reveals the heart of the author... an enormous heart that contains a wide range of emotions: joy, melancholy, loss, separations.

The blues is the essence of this song... so powerful is the whisper that it seems like the ghost of Billie Holiday, with her scotch in hand, dancing in our summer nights, under a swarm of annoying insects, speeding toward the hills.
This is the blanket on which you made love along the river, the finger that parted your lips, the tongue that discovered your skin for that one time that counts...
Everything in this album is beauty, whispered power, infinite sweetness. Infinite is the sense of perdition that derives from it... there is something inherently alcoholic in this album, something that tastes of that bottle of wine which, at 20 years old, with your first love, you drained mixing the grape juice with kisses.
God! I feel like a Bacio Perugina! But every time I listen to this authentic masterpiece of songwriting and melancholy, I melt into rapture... there are no more taxes and bills to pay... there is no more Poldo to take out for a walk... There is the ultimate desire to love, once again, despite the suffering and the fact that it is inevitable, to love despite the ghosts because, without these feelings, without her lips tinted with a soft violet: she so shy who wears little makeup to go to a party, she who would have been perfect... without these things life is not really worth being marked by our filthy steps.
Sometimes.

A memorable album, truly "out of season" and bizarre, very much so, where an Emily Bronte sings of the ghosts of her loves; Heathcliff is nowhere to be seen and she drinks, drinks in spite of him and the whole family and the damned Wuthering Heights.