Beth Gibbons’s latest album touched me more deeply than most of what I heard in 2024. She’s true to herself and honest in a way that’s extraordinarily disarming. Her vulnerability matches, in a microcosmic and yet authentic way, the unutterable pain and suffering that has coursed through the year, amplified by the media-boosted repetition of horrific news cycles.
This isn’t a time for celebration, but for empathy and the homeopathic healing that comes from songs that speak directly from the heart. Like cures like, so they say, and shedding layers of protective skin, the former singer from Portishead goes in there, very deep and touches a collective nerve.
The production on the album is flawless, original and perfectly suited to the journey of introspection she takes us on, like an intimate friend, never shy of exposing her emotions. The musicians around her are unusually attuned to the bare contours and inner pulse of her soul: multi-instrumentalists that bring a range of textures to her song, and sensitive backing vocals – almost angelic in tone – that echo the gentle rawness of her own voice.
There have been other albums that have impressed – notably Beyoncé’s daring riff on country, Cowboy Carter, and the others listed below, but Gibbons’s album bears repeated listening, with all the richness of a masterpiece. Seeing her do the material live at the Salle Pleyel in Paris – not her best performance, so she told me, as it was the first in the tour – was a revelation: one of those gigs that will join the best I have seen in over 60 years of concert-going, Little Feat at the Rainbow, in 1973, the Band in Boston in 1968, Bruce Springsteen at the Hammersmith Odeon early in his career, and others.
Three more essential albums of 2024
Beyoncé Cowboy Carter
Kendrick Lamar GNX
Lizz Wright Shadow
Musical experience of the year
As always there have been many high points, ranging far and wide, in terms of genre and geography. There were as usual, great moments at WOMAD, notably a wonderful set by veteran DJ Paulette and the vibrant music of TC and the Groove Family; the fabulous French conductor Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion, his youthful choir and orchestra, doing Bach’s B Minor Mass in the baroque splendour of the Versailles’ Chapelle Royale; the trance-inducing Master Musicians of Joujouka in the hills of the Rif Mountains in Morocco; a stunning production of Britten’s Death in Venice by the WNO at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff; and a magical gig by PJ Harvey, for a few hundred locals only in the Tropical Gardens in Abbotsbury in Dorset, an intense warm-up for her Glastonbury gig.
Track of the Year
“Circling” by Lizz Wright
