Beth Orton's third album finds the lanky North Country girl with a bit of a problem. Her first two albums brought her every success a solo artist could reasonably desire, from consistently strong record sales to glory at the Brit awards. By now, however, her basic formula of acoustic folk with electronic trappings is beginning to wear a little thin - and so Daybreaker finds her experimenting as never before, beefing up her wispy compositions with sturdy instrumentation such as horns, electric guitars and, incredibly enough, drums. For all this, however, Orton remains a frustratingly elusive presence - her songs tend to wash over the listener like gentle rain, pleasant but often inconsequential. When they work - as roughly a third of them do here - they're genuinely beautiful, but far too often Orton's whimsical lyrics struggle badly to hold the attention. Only on the single 'Concrete Sky', a duet with Ryan Adams, does she really sound engaged, and even then the result verges on the mawkish. A genuine talent - but you get the feeling that her best work is still ahead of her.
