With a new album, Daybreaker, due at the end of the month, this one-off show was an opportunity for Beth Orton to shake down the new songs in front of a friendly Camden crowd. Throughout her career, Orton has rubbed shoulders with some leading techno-practitioners, including William Orbit, Andy Weatherall and the Chemical Brothers. The Daybreaker songs fit squarely into the same lineage, mixing folk, pop and country with a hint of mysticism and some crafty electronic tweaks. There's a sizable debt to the pioneering efforts of John Martyn running through her work, too. She even sings the Martyn-evoking phrase "falling into solid air" in Thinking About Tomorrow, a show-stopping track on the new album performed somewhat listlessly here.
Wherever it comes from, the appliance of science to her rootsy songwriting gives some intriguing results. The live drumkit got a mechanised leg-up, while amplification lent a raw, strident edge to the string section of violin and cello. Daybreaker kicked along over a blippy electro-beat that might have been surreptitiously lifted out of Herbie Hancock's back pocket, bursting out into wide open spaces for the choruses. In Anywhere, the band clicked into a smooth funk-soul groove, bouncing nimbly ahead over a fat, rubbery bassline. For Concrete Sky, Orton's brisk guitar strum led the way over a scraping cello drone and the resonant clang of Sean Read's electric piano. Elsewhere, the sparkly shimmer of the keyboards often recalled Miles Davis wearing his 1970s jazz-fusion hat.
While the ensemble performances were frequently impressive, the mannered drone of Orton's voice began to grate as the show ground on towards the two-hour mark. The cracked timbre and deliberately mangled vowels may be all right as an occasional effect, but they wear painfully thin as a continuous strategy. And she doesn't really sing melodies, preferring to lay separate tones on top of each other, like musical Lego. The limitations of this approach were exposed in the faux-rustic Carmella.
Maybe the punters had heard enough, too. By the time she reached This One's Gonna Bruise, a new song donated by Ryan Adams, the babble of conversation by the bar almost drowned it out. Judicious editing required.
