Album: Beth Orton

Daybreaker, Heavenly

Right from the opening bars of "Paris Train", with its excited whirl of strings, there's an air of urgency about Beth Orton's third album, Daybreaker. It's there in the wanderlust of the title track – "We burn our boats each new year/ Silently watching the flames and the old life disappear" – and in "Mount Washington", with its existential acknowledgement that "You are alone into the unknown you are." But for all its forward thinking, there's precious little progress in the album's musical cast. It follows much the same course as 1999's Central Reservation, with her band's warm folk-jazz settings and the subtle modernist contributions of dance-culture boffins such as William Orbit, the Chemical Brothers and Ben Watt smoothed into shape by her long-time producer, Victor Van Vugt. Orton's increased transatlantic profile has also secured contributions from Emmylou Harris, whose crystalline harmonies adorn "God Song", and Ryan Adams, who plays on "Concrete Sky" and "Carmella" and also chips in with one of his own songs, "This One's Gonna Bruise". The confessional tone fits seamlessly alongside Orton's own material, which finds her fretting over the vagaries of love in all its forms – found, lost, unrequited and betrayed. It's a welcoming album that should please fans, without challenging them too much.