Comfort of Strangers
Label: Astralwerks
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Comfort of Strangers
It’s a popular misconception that by stripping music down to the barest essentials you meet the real artist. What is Lennon without his double-tracked vocals, Waits without his junkyard assembly, Nirvana without the distortion? At least the Ramones never gave us an MTV Unplugged. So Beth Orton, the folkie with three albums of techno gimmicks behind her, finally sheds the Chemical Brothers, Terry Callier and other electronically inclined studio friends to sit down with producer Jim O’Rourke (Wilco, Sonic Youth) for an analog wedding. Their two weeks at Sear Sound in NYC cast Orton as a modern-day hippie chanteuse. Comfort of Strangers is sweet and organic, songs of love punctuated with drawings of flowers; it’s occasionally silly and surprisingly dark, although it never reaches the heightened tension of her second album, Central Reservation. Instead, it’s mainly comprised of modest word puzzles that sound as if she’s talking herself through a bad patch. They once made Sandy Denny albums like this.
This article appears in Feb 1-7, 2006.