It’s not that we ever saw faults in her, because we saw none, but we never really expected to experience the kind of expanding, open-ended consistency that Kathryn Williams has gone on to lay claim to with such natural grace as the years pass by. Her paeans of hushed folk prettiness were, back in the beginning, so tender, so delicate, so genuine, that we didn’t give a thought to that being upheld with any significance. To be consistent is one thing, but to be familiar without breeding contempt, without numbing the skin and sedating the hairs that once stood on end at the sound of her voice, is quite another. And here, on her fifth album of original material, every track sparkles with the fairy dust of organic emotion, still fresh, still eye-catching.
Last year’s stunning, and somewhat surprising ‘Over Fly Over’ saw her adding strings of texture to her bow, like dark clouds gathering over her guarded, scented meadow and throwing long interesting shadows down the length of her songs. The rough edges of that period are largely smoothed over or worm down on ‘Leave To Remain’, but the depth of field remains and songs like ‘Stevie’ with its thick haunting cello and the whipped-up-to-heights-without-warning crescendo of the otherwise dainty ‘Let It Happen’ stand as testament to that.
By and large though we return to the smooth muted beauty of her breakthrough ‘Little Black Numbers’. She is still the Beth Orton that Beth Orton just can’t push herself to become, possessing the kind of wide-eyed honesty and naïve hippie purity of Joni Mitchell, and tip-toeing her way through track after track like Nick Drake stepping over a wooden stile into a higher octave. “Your face has all the features of my favourite landscape,” she muses in ‘Glass Bottom Boat’, one of many beautifully developed reflections, in this song alone and throughout the album “wild, rocky and desolate, a place weather can play”. The same can be applied to she.