Years after switching off her synthesizer and finding full-time comfort in the arms of a six-string, Beth Orton’s voice is back in its original habitat. Long before she was a folksy troubadour type, Orton made her name by working with the likes of William Orbit and The Chemical Brothers. And while Kidsticks isn’t entirely a throwback, it’s as close as she’s gotten in over a decade.
The results are a blend of warm, hazy trip-outs and hard-line grooves that cohesively intertwine atop beds of keyboard bleeps and bass whirrs. The twirling indie pop of Moon sees Orton, fittingly, run rings around artists half her age attempting to do the exact same thing; while the lite-psych of Wave lets the strange bedfellows of ‘80s synth tone and jazzy polyrhythm tussle about until they’ve come to an agreement.
It’s not a painless transition – some tracks linger slightly too long in feedback loops, while the insubstantial title track could’ve been discarded entirely. Still, it’s a refreshing and surprising album from an artist that could easily have spent the rest of her career safely doing exactly the opposite.
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
