Beth Orton is fat-free angel cake, a guiltless dessert; so goes the rock-crit wisdom. In other words, she's indiedom's pet mainstreamer, a slightly humiliating vocation that can be traced back to a massive contextual mix-up. Here's what happened: Orton's prolonged stint as the Chemical Brothers' ashanti (to launch a term for the go-to hook girl) got her 1997 solo debut, *Trailer Park, into thousands of Discmen theretofore unsullied by chanteuses. Brit ravers who'd never mind Orton's Lilith Fair kin-- or, later, Dido-- embraced her music as a particularly luxurious species of chill-out. Critics, for their part, acted as if Orton were the first to dress acoustic folk in loops and ambient beds. (Actually, it was Suzanne Vega, whose 1992 album * 99.9\xBA F was so far ahead of the curve that it sounds, well, current).
Two more song collections followed, with predictably diminishing returns. Orton never fiddled with the formula enough to alienate her original audience, but the ardor gradually faded. Both Central Reservation and Daybreaker were roughly three parts twang to one part electronica-- a docile, infinitely accommodating recipe that absorbed contributions from Dr. John, Emmylou Harris, Ben Harper, Ryan "Rock'n'Roll" Adams and the Chemical Brothers with equal ease.
So: three albums (each with a cover photo featuring the gawky singer in a sun-dappled outdoor scenario), zero hits outside the UK, and a dwindling supply of critical benevolence. Doesn't quite sound like the moment for a greatest-hits album. And yet here is Pass in Time, containing no less than 54.5% of Trailer Park (six songs out of eleven!), 41.6% of Central Reservation and, mercifully, only 20% of last year's Daybreaker.
Until the chronology begins to hiccup toward the end of disc one, the collection scans like a producer's progress report: from album to album the sonic spaces grow wider and the instrumentation more lush. Trailer Park's "Sugar Boy" is typical early Orton-- simple, delicate and almost imperceptibly stilted by its own politesse. "Stolen Car", which opened Central Reservation, is a darker Beth, the main harmony alternately caressed and bruised by mewling backward guitars. The album provides a two-song glimpse into the singer's "embarrassing" pre-debut, an early 90s recording called Superpinkymandy-- in reality, the iffy production is the only factor setting these tunes apart from the rest; as a songwriter, Orton is consistent to a fault. Pass in Time's second disc culminates with her collaborations with William Orbit, an EP's worth of echoey pop that may hint at a future direction. The future, as you might have guessed, sounds fairly familiar.
The single most interesting thing about Beth Orton remains her unique voice, best described as a kind of guttural lilt. An all-purpose instrument, it glides as smoothly alongside Princess Superstar's blabber as it does over the Chemical Brothers' crunch (whose deafening coda to "Where Do I Begin" off the Vanilla Sky soundtrack delivers this collection's sole moment of urgency). The awful truth about Beth Orton may be that she is still, at heart, an ashanti.
