THE OBSERVER

Supernatural selection
Portishead's singer is right at home in a Wicker Man world of rural eeriness where desolation becomes majestic

With the third Portishead album missing in action - now presumed lost on some far-flung western isle where the trip-hop wars are still raging - it's a relief to find that vocalist Beth Gibbons has not been lost with it. Whatever the brilliance of the production skills of Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, it was Gibbons's haunted quaver that lingered in the marrow of your bones, long after Portishead's beats had faded into memory.

On her riveting Out of Season, Gibbons collaborates principally with an unlikely foil, former Talk Talk hand Paul Webb. Largely unobtrusive in the songs, he's known here, for reasons unexplained, as Rustin Man, a title he shares with the song that forms the album's strange coda. The name does conjure up a useful visual, though: a seaside Wicker Man, burnt red by salt and wind. Rarely has the creepy old folk of this iconic film found a more compelling modern echo than in Gibbons's otherworldly traditionals.

It resonates particularly in one song, the album's opener, 'Mysteries', a sparse, plucked, aerated melody recalling The Wicker Man 's 'Willow's Song'.

Of course, Out of Season isn't actually a collection of sinister harvest-time sing-songs. The blues are in operation here, among the tawny colours of the British folk tradition; and the sepulchral tinkle of small-hours jazz is a mainstay of sophisticated songs like 'Romance'. 'Tom The Model' is an out-and-out torch ballad, a single in waiting that recalls Portishead.

But there is a peculiarly rural eeriness at work on Out of Season, with its spooky 'Spider Monkey' and its worship of natural forces; one with a long history, and one that Gibbons is thoroughly complicit in. The album opens like the start of Macbeth, in wind and rain, with the supernatural abroad.

'Mysteries' itself is wonderful, everything anyone could want from a tune heralding Gibbons's return: aching, yearning, in acoustic awe before the mysteries of love. 'Tom The Model' mops up everything else: regret, drama, strings, abandon. They're both love songs, but obsessed with change and the passage of time.

These themes run though Out of Season like underground streams, meandering through Gibbons's impressive range of vocal styles. 'Sand River' dwells folkily on dying leaves, a lament for, and a celebration of, the beauty of nature. The flux of the seasons, the inconstancy of the human heart and the ghosts all come together most stunningly and devastatingly on 'A Funny Time Of Year'. A jazz dirge for the death of the year, it sees Gibbons realise that 'nothing's gonna change,' and chew the words in desolation. It's a rare pleasure to hear her hurt so majestically again.

Kitty Empire