Portishead's Beth Gibbons offers darkness in shades of uncertainty in taut show

The Age

5 days ago

VIVID LIVE
BETH GIBBONS
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, May 30
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★
Here was a night which could be summarised with its beginning and its end, and yet to do so might also suggest something altogether different than what was experienced.
It began with middle eastern flavours, a drone and a hum and sinuous rhythms, and ended with a closed-eyed dance of limbs unfurled beneath rolling drums and chanting under-voices.
Within that was the fluidity and coiled spring of an eight-piece band of much more than a dozen parts (Howard Jacobs alone played flute, bass saxophone, tuned percussion and drums; Emma Smith tripled on violin, guitar and vocals; everyone did something extra). Through that was a physical release, almost joyfully so, of some kind of shadow dancing.
A sometimes queasy romantic current pulsed within those songs, Tell Me Who You Are Today and Reaching Out, one also evident in the more controlled movement and clearer, if still pock-marked, faith of Lost Changes, a mid-show moment whose refrain of 'time changes, life changes/Is what changes thing/We're all lost together' dispelled and invited darkness at the same time.
And how could we not ride the groovy baby groovy splendour of Tom The Model, a song that evoked a never-happened-but-should have '60s moment of Gene Pitney produced by Neil Diamond. All this was true.
And yet inside it all was the other story Beth Gibbons tells, of that darkness in shades of uncertainty, of a taut line holding rhythms close and emotions closer still, of drums as likely to be played with mallets as sticks, sonorous rather than sharp.
And most of all of the intensity that held, compelled through everything, broken only when at the end of each song Gibbons – whose voice is unchanged, and if anything even firmer – turned her back, retreated to the even darker space behind and broke from our gaze.