Music review: Beth Gibbons, Usher Hall, Edinburgh - 'exquisite singing, pure and precise'

It has been 16 years since trip-hop trailblazers Portishead last released an album. For the last ten of those, their singer Beth Gibbons has been working on – some might say agonising over – her debut solo album, Lives Outgrown.

Gibbons hasn’t aged – heck, maybe she hasn’t moved – in all that time, her stage stance unaltered. There she was, still clinging on to the mic stand as if it was a crutch, silhouetted by backlit beams, communicating all she needed to through her exquisite singing, pure and precise, with breath and body in her tone.

Her seven-piece band must also take effusive credit for this bewitching gig. Gibbons and her producer, Talk Talk’s Lee Harris, may have laboured over meticulous arrangements but the results are elemental, from the deep bass notes, discordant drones and swooning eastern strings of noir folk opener Tell Me Who You Are Today via the spry percussion and rumbling toms of torch blues number Burden of Life to the baroque keyboards, plangent guitar and scraping strings of Floating on a Moment.

The band also provided dramatic monastic backing vocals on For Sale and took up corrugaphones – whirly tubes to you and me – at the start of Rewind, an electric gothic concoction of grungey rhythms and strident acoustic guitar, before pulling back to voice and picked guitar for Mysteries, from her 2002 album with Rustin Man.

The haunting backing vocal drone, capped with Gibbons’ eerie soprano, was spine-tingling stuff but the entire show was a treat for the ears, culminating in the mighty Morricone-style onslaught of Beyond the Sun and the pastoral delicacy and fluttering flute of Whispering Love.

As a bonus treat on this last night of their tour, they played two Portishead songs – Road from Dummy and the thrilling canter of The Rip from Third – before the lights went up to reveal a beaming, thankful Gibbons, merely mortal after all.