Beth Gibbons, Gorecki, and the darkness of faith

A few years ago, Beth Gibbons decided to learn Polish. That is, she learned enough Polish to perform Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki.

As the frontwoman for the English trip-hop giants Portishead, Gibbons was not operatically trained, but her recording nonetheless earned positive reviews, with her characteristically anxious Gen-X chanteuse style providing a new interpretation to the lament. As both a longstanding Portishead fan and an admirer of Górecki’s piece, I appreciated Gibbons’ interpretation when I first heard it, and it has since become a staple in my growing rotation of the beautiful, melancholic works upon which I rely to stay sane in a mad world.

For those who do not know the symphony, the first movement is a fifteenth-century song of Mary. The second is a setting of words from the wall a Gestapo prison in the southern Polish town of Zakopane during World War II. They read, “Oh Mamma do not cry, no. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, always support me.” The third movement is a modern folk song from the mouth of a mother who lost her son during the Silesian uprisings against the Weimer Republic.

Górecki wrote his great work in 1976, transitioning from more avant-garde compositions to a sacred music throwback that was met with widespread acclaim in Poland, with Stefania Woytowicz in the soprano role when it was first recorded in 1978. Appreciation of the piece subsequently grew, and it has been performed and recorded throughout the world regularly since the fall of communism. Parts of the symphony have been featured in various television shows and films, and in the same year that Gibbons recorded her version, Terrence Malick used another one in A Hidden Life, his great biopic about the life of the Austrian martyr Blessed Franz Jägerstätter.

For me, Gibbons’ recording of “The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” provides a new way to appreciate her earlier work, with lyrics that were almost always equal parts lament and mystery, set to music that was part spooky electronica and part big band. The desire for reality is everywhere – even, or especially, the sad and troubling side of reality. On the horn-driven 1994 track “Glory Box” from Portishead’s debut album Dummy, Gibbons repeatedly emotes, “Give me a reason to be a woman!” On the 2008 synthesizer-heavy “The Rip,” Gibbons sings, “The tenderness I feel will send the darkness underneath. Will I follow?” And on my favorite of Gibbons’ efforts, a largely acoustic collaborative album with Rustin Man from 2002 called Out of Season, each song conveys the sad beauty of love gained and lost, but there is hope too. The record’s first track, “Mysteries,” sets the tone with the opening line, “God knows I adore life.”

Following her dalliance with Górecki’s classical piece and a long layoff from popular music, Gibbons has returned with a new album called Lives Outgrown, a batch of her own sorrowful songs a decade in the making, and in English. Now fifty-nine years old, Gibbons reflects directly on death, with songs that are at once personal and universal, as well as soul-stirring. In a note posted on Facebook to announce the album, the notoriously private Gibbons described her new songs as the result of “a time of farewells to family, friends and even to who I was before, the lyrics mirroring my anxieties and sleepless nighttime ruminations.”

As expected from Gibbons’ previous work, the album lacks the saccharine consolation that detracts from feeling the full effect of the blessings of grief; but it is not all doom and gloom. For those of us who have increasing difficulty seeing the true light except through the experience of darkness, Gibbons’ effort is a small, apophatic revelation that stands apart from both the humdrum tyranny of secular pop and the clumsiness of religious or self-consciously “inspirational” art. Again, in the Facebook note, Gibbons describes her subject as “something I fear but just need to try and celebrate as a moment approaching, gifting the ability to grow beyond the restraints of this physical world.”

Musically, Lives Outgrown is folky rather than electronic, with just a couple of large orchestral arrangements and with soft percussion on most of the tracks. On the whole, the record is more reminiscent of Nick Drake of the 1960’s than the MTV buzz bin of the 1990’s, when Portishead rose to fame. In the opening line of the first track, “Tell Me Who You Are Today” Gibbons wonders, “If I could change the way I feel…,” hearkening back to the first words from “Mysterons” thirty years earlier: “Inside you’re pretending….” With the perplexing line “a pagan sorrow my command,” the song grapples with the inability to make oneself physically well, just as the younger version of Gibbons found only phoniness in self-constructed emotions. To be alive – inside and out – is nothing but gift, in sour times and sweet.

The second track, “Floating on a Moment” begins with a sultry solo guitar riff on top of breathing sounds, building eventually to vibraphone, vocal harmonies by children, and a pretty chorus: “I’m floating on a moment, don’t know how long. No one knows. No one can stay.” Although to give a full account of the virtue of hope ultimately requires us to say more, there is something striking in the simplicity of Gibbons’ conclusion, repeated four times: “All we have is here and now.” After all, there is no better time than the present for eternity to matter to us.

An ominous drumbeat undergirds “The Burden of Life,” which features some of Gibbons’ best poetry. She sings “the time’s never right when we’re trading the sun” – a reminder of how often all of us think about and talk about what we will do someday, or what we plan to do when we’ve gotten through what we’re in now, or what we want to do when we’re in the right mood, or when we feel better, or have more money. She finishes the song with relatable regret about all these deferred moments of real living: “the time’s never right when you’re losing a soul.”

The fourth song, “Love Changes” is my favorite of the lot, set to an easy waltz and giving voice to nostalgia. Gibbons’ lyrics are a plain acknowledgement of the mutable nature of material reality – a painful realization for modern people, famously sublimated by St. John Henry Newman in the quotable phrase, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Gibbons, like most of us, is still far from perfect, longing for the memory of things past in the form of erotic love that has morphed into something more ordinary: “All that I want is to love you the way I used to.”

“Rewind” is a more jarring song, with distorted guitars paired with lyrics that convey lament about the state of the natural world. Gibbons sings, “the wild has no more to give.” She also criticizes consumerism, singing, “Empty with our possessions, and trouble is we still feel unfed.” One does not have to be a tree-hugger or a communist to share Gibbons’ sadness on both fronts. The next track, “Reaching Out,” has a similar musical urgency, but with straightforward lyrics about lost love.

“Oceans” is an alluring, meandering piece that makes repeated mention of a particularly feminine grief: “fooled ovulation but no babe in me.” And because of or in spite of whatever has gone on inside Gibbons’ womb, she confesses it is her heart that is “tired and worn,” and “reality fails me.” The vast expanse of the sea, not far from Gibbons’ hometown of Exeter on the southwest coast of England, offers meaningful escape: “I’m lost in the tide just like heavens inside.” The next track, “For Sale,” includes the best of several haunting intros to songs on the album. In this case, it transitions to a lovely, melodic chorus, with lyrics focused on the delusions of modern happiness: “We believe if we stich it and cook it and rich it, we’ll all numb the pain that we need to fulfill it.”

The lyrics to the penultimate cut “Beyond the Sun” are about darkness; and here is where I find the best example of the apophaticism that illuminates the whole record. Gibbons asks, “Would I still visit the place in the dark?” To many people whose faith in God or people or institutions has waned, the answer is an obvious no. If you don’t feel it, don’t be part of it. But to the spiritually mature, there is some consolation in the companionship of darkness, as in Psalm 88. Górecki certainly was not afraid to go there with Symphony No. 3, and nor is Gibbons on Lives Outgrown. She concludes with a statement that may be disturbing at first to a Christian listener who finds himself in a particularly happy time in his faith. Gibbons sings, “The loss of faith, filled with doubt. No relief can be found.”

But is faith always or even mostly about consolation? No. Rather, we find Truth as we confront and move past distortions, “beyond the sun” – what God is not, what the Church is not, what we are not.

The album’s finale, “Whispering Love,” sounds most like the aforementioned Nick Drake, and particularly the sad, gorgeous songs from his 1969 masterpiece Five Leaves Left. The last words of Lives Outgrown evoke a profound sense of expectation that Drake, alas, did not live long enough to embrace: “Oh whispering love, blow through my heart. When you can.” Lives Outgrown then closes with pleasant birdsong, which should remind us that our sorrowful songs always incorporate a natural melody that the noise of present woes can never totally drown out.

As I finished listening closely to the record, I gave thanks to God that Beth Gibbons decided to learn some Polish. In a roundabout way, Górecki’s masterpiece may have brought forth the more modest but welcome achievement of Lives Outgrown, which Gibbons describes as attempting to avoid the “addiction of high frequencies that satisfy like sugar and salt.” It is a humane, spiritually mature accomplishment. A rare gift.