Today: a lost classic

Today, I am mostly listening to Beth Gibbons and Rustin' Man's Out of Season, from 2002. Rustin' Man is Paul Webb, formerly of cerebral popsters Talk Talk.

This is one of my favourite albums. I have a bit of a completist problem: I will chase up the solo albums by the third drummer in a splinter group (keeping up with New Order offshoots is a headache). Sometimes it pays off: Eggman's First Fruits is a minor pop-psych delight (Sice from The Boo Radleys).

So. Beth Gibbons of course is the singer from Portishead, and this is her only solo album so far. It's a really dark, lovely folk album with bits of jazz and other things mixed in there. It reminds me of fellow West Country aboriginal P J Harvey's more recent terrifying and stunning White Chalk: both are exposed, fragile and bleak but also hugely beautiful - encapsulated by the name, in both cases (as an aside, Terry Pratchett, another West Country dweller has also written a series of books featuring Tiffany Aching, a young witch whose strength is derived from the hard choices she has to make on the chalk hills). The lyrics are all about repressed emotions, mostly of the desperate variety, while beautiful tunes quietly go about their business in the background. Gibbon's fragile, lovely voice (exposed here, rather than heavily treated as it was in Portishead) and the hushed instrumentation make this an album for listening to while the summer rain beats on your window. It no doubt sounds awful on your mobile phone.

I really don't know why this wasn't a huge, huge hit.