INDEPENDENT

Before she joined Geoff Barrow in Portishead, Beth Gibbons auditioned for the singer's slot in O'rang, the group formed by Talk Talk's bassist, Paul Webb, after that band's late-Eighties departure from EMI in the wake of Spirit of Eden. Portishead's sudden success pre-empted matters, but Gibbons and Webb remained friends, hooking up again in recent years to work on the material that became Out of Season, Webb adopting the pseudonym "Rustin Man" after the first song they completed – a creepy, atmospheric piece which closes the album with Gibbons' voice slithering like a snake across a scrawl of weatherbeaten organ.

The album title is intended to evoke the nature of ageing, of slipping out of step with the times, though ironically the songs' autumnal hues and moods are perfectly in season: it's the most October-ly of albums you'll hear, full of melancholy and retrospection, stark and sad as trees losing their leaves as they give up on the promises of summer. "It's that feeling of decay when the values you put on things have no relevance any more because the world's moved on to another place," as Webb says of "Rustin Man" – though he could be talking about any of the songs, really. It's certainly true of the desolate "Spyder", in which "time is but a memory/ Beautiful for some/ Feathered like a majorette/ In rows, unsaid, undone"; and particularly of "Sand River", where autumn leaves prompt "watercoloured memories/ Soft as a summer's breeze... pretty as can be/ Everyone can see/ Everyone but me".

Musically, the first thing you notice about Out of Season is the absence of the trip hop beats which corralled Gibbons' voice in Portishead. Instead, subtle tints of acoustic guitar and keyboards allow her murmured intimacies to stand alone, more isolated and vulnerable than ever, with her layered background vocals adding a ghostly choral backdrop to several songs, spooky and tremulous as a theremin. The instrumental detail is likewise a model of restraint and discretion, from the lugubrious cello break of "Show" to the toy piano that concludes "Spyder". Caressed by strings and wistful harmonica, the folk-jazz lope "Drake" recalls the likes of Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, though elsewhere Webb's brooding orchestral arrangements have more of the darkly inventive quality of the late David Ackles, another songwriter stranded outside his time. Like their work, Out of Season has little relation to the mainstream pop trifles of its era, but will undoubtedly outlast them, growing in pertinence with each passing season.

By Andy Gill