Beth Orton’s The Ground Above doesn’t just revisit sleep and dream—she treats them like something you can work through. Across long, textured tracks, the album moves from grief to hope, from inherited silence to a kind of daily alertness, ending on an alive-ne
On The Ground Above, Beth Orton seems to trust time the way some people trust weather: not as a guarantee, but as a force you can learn to stand inside.
The album’s mood doesn’t arrive all at once. It takes its time. letting the record’s “ambient introduction” settle into place with Orton’s Rhodes meeting Dave Okumu’s backwards electric guitar “like water trickling into the soil.” Then. over eight minutes. “The Ground Above” makes a slow ascent—grief to hope. and love threaded through both—until even the singer’s command feels physical: “Let it wipe me out like chalk off of a board.” Grey McMurray’s spacious guitar and Shahzad Ismaily’s delicate bass do their careful work around her. but what holds the song steady is Orton’s “weighted vulnerability. ” the kind that can hold a mother’s love and “that of war” in the same breath as long as she knows what she’s fighting for.
The album keeps returning to the same central tension: dreams versus waking life. and what it means to come alive without pretending you can escape the dirt below. Orton even folds the question into the record’s own imagery—she “treasures liminality. ” singing. “I’ve been waiting at the edge of a dream/ To jump and fly and find my beautiful wings.” Elsewhere. she points out that not all dreams belong to her: “a set of dreams. not the literal kind. aren’t her own.” In one of the album’s telling motifs. a blackbird doesn’t wake her so much as it signals she’s been drifting “in and out of sleep.”.
By the time you get to “Before I Knew. ” the record’s careful drift starts to feel like an emotional argument. Recorded mostly live. it has “less of a clear progression” than the opener. but it’s built from a misty. foreboding atmosphere: Adrian Utley’s guitar brushes softly against Christos Stylianides’ trumpet. Orton carries “the weight of inherited trauma and belief. ” still “at a loss for words. ” yet she finds the ones she needs and strings them into place—“You bled it out into goodbye” evokes what the song wants you to feel. sometimes “maybe before you’ve even heard it.”.
Then “Cigarette Curls” shifts the temperature without breaking the spell. It’s the first track that doesn’t rise from the ether. kicking off with a vibrant rhythm section: Chris Vatalaro on drums and Mauro Refosco on congas. Orton reflects on a formative friendship. and the details are real even when the feelings are simple and all-consuming—“hopelessness and fear perhaps softened. ” though not erased by time. as she sings. “moves faster than the pain.” The track also showcases its mechanics as much as its memories: there are “three electric guitarists” on the song. two of whom draw out separate solos with distinct personality. Nick Hakim’s closing harmonies arrive “curling, naturally, upward,” and it feels less like a conclusion than a release.
With “Waiting. ” Orton pulls you into a wrong assumption and then gives you something truer to her own way of writing. The song sounds like it could be a wistful piano ballad. but it soon coasts on a “gorgeous flurry of instrumentation. ” particularly flute and organ. “I was going to write a gratitude list/ Just got to work out my resentment to it. ” she sings. as if she’s not in the studio at all—just working through feelings on a day off. The past still holds pain, but the present gets chosen. “Anytime I hear the music we played/ I dissolve into a puddle of rain. ” Orton says. and the band makes it sound like a breezy homecoming.
Back in a dreamscape. “Celestial Light” carries the quiver in Orton’s voice and lets it bathe in reverb alongside layers of synth. guitar. and flute. The solitude is vast enough to make the first song on the album without a “you” feel like a decision—until near the end. when Orton addresses someone else entirely. not a lost figure in her past but “more likely the person on the other end. listening.” The line is both tender and direct: “I hope you’ll never make it through the night/ Without first getting kissed by celestial light.” She hasn’t “ever. not really. ” which changes the gratitude-list feeling from comfort to vow.
When “I’ll Miss You” arrives, a “certain you” returns violently—not as a cliché, but as amplification. Orton doesn’t just perform breakup language; she pushes against the emptiness with something self-actualizing. “And it isn’t like I don’t feel you in everything. ” she admits. before turning the idea inside out: “But these dreams aren’t mine. they’re someone else’s suffering/ Honey I’m full of wonder.” The heartbreak is here. but so is agency.
“Love You Right” is where the album’s conviction starts to sound like power. Over shuffling percussion and stirring strings. Orton gives one of her most powerful vocal performances. delivering conviction that “rub[s] the triteness off a line like. ‘You made my world a sweeter home.’” The song also asks the uncomfortable question the opener invites—“How on earth can a war be euphoric?”—and answers with an image that refuses to soften into slogans. Orton frames the battles people keep fighting “ecstatically. ” “not in the name of love or anything so much as for the sake of something good. ” and she gives the idea its language: “A fine gold thread in all the places that I bled.” It’s a metaphor for the stars. yes. but Orton lets it become “also that you.”.
The album follows that euphoric trajectory down to its natural conclusion in “Otherside.” It ends louder. more revelatory than “the one preceding it.” The conduit for tears isn’t “lost love” but “a blackbird’s hopeful song”—an “eternal metaphor made vivid” by gospel-infused instrumentation. Orton wonders. “I heard the mother of the world cry out with grief/ What is this sound that seems to echo out of me. ” and when the song answers. it lands on one indisputable quality: alive.
The sequence matters: each turn of instrumentation and each shift in who Orton is addressing keeps steering the album away from sleep as refuge and toward wakefulness as a kind of moral stance—grief treated as material. not a stopping point. By the time the blackbird returns at the end. the record doesn’t feel like it’s offering escape from the world below. It feels like Orton asking you to plant your feet there. even when you can’t escape the back roads of your mind.
Beth Orton The Ground Above album review music English singer-songwriter Weather Alive Rhodes Dave Okumu Adrian Utley Christos Stylianides Shahzad Ismaily Grey McMurray Shahzad Ismaily Nick Hakim Nick Hakim harmonies gospel-infused instrumentation blackbird cultural identity