The album was assembled step by step during the last 10 years, whereas Gibbons sometimes resurfaced with different initiatives: composing movie scores, performing Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) with the Polish Nationwide Radio Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on “Mom I Sober.”
Produced by Gibbons and James Ford (of Simian Cellular Disco), “Lives Outgrown” depends on hand-played devices, nevertheless it typically juxtaposes them in surreal methods. Ford alone performs an enormous assortment — guitars, dulcimer, keyboards, woodwinds, brasses, even musical noticed — whereas the drummer Lee Harris (from Speak Speak), who shares some songwriting credit, makes use of all types of discovered percussion, together with containers and kitchenware. For the primary time in her catalog, Gibbons allowed herself to layer on backup vocals, which materialize like a ghostly sisterhood.
Her new songs take an extended view: pondering lifetimes and generations, connecting private considerations to planetary ones. In “Rewind,” with a 5/4 beat and melodies tinged with Arabic modes, she hints at local weather change, singing, “Now that we now have had our enjoyable/Time to acknowledge the harm executed.” Drums and percussion erupt behind her as she worries that “The wild has no extra to provide/Gone too deep, gone too far to rewind.”
“Lives Outgrown” is stuffed with reflections that sound hard-earned; there’s new grain in Gibbons’s voice. “Without end ends, you’ll develop previous,” she admonishes in “Misplaced Adjustments,” a slow-strummed march with echoes of Pink Floyd’s “Hey You.” In “Past the Solar,” a modal drone that gathers an more and more insistent drumbeat, she wonders, “If I had recognized the place I’d begun/Would I nonetheless worry the place I would finish?”
“Lives Outgrown” isn’t a story, however its music is constructed to be heard as a complete cycle. It really works its approach by way of doubt and want and despair to discover a chastened however worthwhile perseverance. The album begins and ends with pastoral guitar ballads, however drums smolder and boil over alongside the way in which. In “Reaching Out,” with a beat and bass riff that trace at Moroccan gnawa music, Gibbons rides a crescendo of frustration and longing: “I would like your like to silence all my disgrace,” she sings.
