Beth Orton - Central Reservation

There's no way to offer a shortcut description of what Beth Orton sounds like. There are so many musical styles pulsing through Central Reservation--jazz, folk, pop, rock, and dance--that the album could easily have ended up an empty exercise in genre-hopping. Instead, it's a bracing example of mongrel music at its best as Orton carves out a new musical vocabulary with deep roots in familiar sounds. --Keith Moerer