Beth Orton
Antone’s Wednesday, March 15
The audience didn’t deserve the encore, and Beth Orton let them know when she told the crowd to shut up because she couldn’t hear herself sing. It was an inimitable Ricki Lee Jones-type moment, although Orton is a bolder presence, and her voice that much more of a weapon. The crowd deserved this talking to; Orton had come to the stage complaining about her throat. By the time she traded her guitar for keyboards on “Worms,” the leadoff from Comfort of Strangers, the London-based chanteuse had limbered her vocal chords plenty. As she cherry picked an array of new selections, and a few older faves, Orton’s able band mirrored her every shift in mood. Reaching the devoted, many beyond the yapping few that would not shut up, Orton delivered a powerful sermon that ran the course from failed love to the problem of religious vendettas, showing herself to be one of the few artists working in the post-9/11 world who has something worth saying about the personal and political. Closing with a harmonica hanging from her neck, Orton’s renditions of “Feral Children” and “Pieces of Sky” were heartbreakingly well wrought.This article appears in March 17 • 2006.