Beth Orton
Central Reservation

"While every phrase spoke the language of Love, I thought it wouldn't retain its meaning. I lost the boundary between right and wrong. I just want to find the place where I belong."

(Beth Orton, "Stolen Car") 

"Central Reservation" is the album, if one can use the term, of the consecration of the Siren of Norwich.

After Trailer Park, '96, she continued with her usual collaborations in the electronic field and waited a good three years to bring forth this her second solo album (to be honest, it would be the third, but that's another story). With the previous one, aided by her special friend Orbit, she earned the accolade of best interpreter of that bizarre sound intertwining known as "Folktronica," but with this, Orton, while not abandoning electronic reminiscences, made a choice that would be, even if not immediately, decisive for her career.

Indeed, "Central Reservation", while maintaining heavy electro references, veered, even if not completely, towards the acoustic shore of the Tall Englishwoman's Artistic Sea, namely the Folk one.

We don't know if the underlying reasons for the choice were due to a far-sighted prediction of a collapse, more public than compositional, of British Synth Music, from wanting to free herself from the image, now sewn onto her, of "sensual voice of the chemical brothers," or perhaps just from a simple choice of affinity towards a genre in which her voice matched (and still does) like classic cheese does on equally classic macaroni, but the fact is that here is the "guitar-slinging" Beth as the protagonist.

Looking at the Notes, in the booklet, the trend is already clear in the collaborations, and if the name Terry Callier seems natural, Ben Harper's might seem less so but the final result dispels any doubt.
The electronic influence, however, is still very much felt: in the touch, not always  credited, of Orbit and also in the guest appearance, on a couple of tracks, of Ben Watt (Everything but the Girl).

Tracks like the Title Track, "Sweetest Decline", "Stars all seem to Weep", and the wonderful "Stolen Car" confirm the melancholic style (not depressed, melancholic, I said) of a unique artist in her own way, endowed with a voice at times singular, sharp yet enticing,  but which always brings that added value to compositions nonetheless interesting even if linear and simple...

... and without falling into the worst of sins, banality.

Mo.