Beth Orton
Daybreaker

The smooth jazz genre in its English form is not dead; in fact, it's doing quite well. Listening to this album by Beth Orton, it seems she has absorbed some folk elements and shaken them up with a bit of electronics and a sprinkle of trip hop to offer us about ten pleasant and non-trivial songs. Behind the production is the skilled hand of Ben Watt, the guitarist from Everything But The Girl, who is directly responsible for a couple of the most beautiful tracks - "Anywhere" and "Daybreaker" - as well as the final "Thinking About Tomorrow". Certainly, the folk inspiration has not been lost, here found in the central part of the album with "Carmella"; "God Song" which gives us Emmylou Harris in a counterpoint, and "This One’s Gonna Bruise" penned by Ryan Adams. It's a pity that the album starts with the somewhat dull triptych of "Paris Train"; "Concrete Sky" (guest vocalist, Ryan Adams) and "Mount Washington" and doesn't have a leading track to truly be memorable. The cover photos are adequately melancholic and nothing special, while I found it irritating that the booklet texts were laid out horizontally without any breaks for four pages. In short, it's folktronica music as someone has called it (though the term is rather ugly) "that doesn't hurt," but certainly not indispensable.