Friday, June 14th at the sold-out Theater of Living Arts in Philadelphia, the next to last stop on her sixteen city pre-tour to promote her upcoming release, which anyone in the crowd not familiar with her previous material would be clueless about—except for a reference to one song as ”you haven’t heard this one before” late in the show Orton gave no hint she was playing new material, a refreshing change from the plug-incessantly-away approach of most musicians. The closest she came to any self-acknowledgment was when, while getting a drink of water, the lithe, tall Orton said, “I’m a little chesty,” patting her chest with one hand, “You may not have noticed.”

In addition to the methods in “Mt. Washington,” Orton has many other devices in her catalogue, lyrical and musical, in which to evoke feeling. Her band has been with her for long enough to feel at ease adjusting to the various touches of style she adds to her basic folk, gentle strokes of jazz, reggae, chamber music, rock, anything but what many have categorized her with since her debut Trailer Park in `97—folk with trip-hop. None of that in evidence, one needed to look no further than the audience, their gazes fixed upon Orton, no movement save for some head swaying. On some of the new tracks—“Paris Train,” “Daybreaker,” “Thinking About Tomorrow,” and “Mt. Washington”—spacey, nearly ambient interludes were employed to good effect between lyrical passages.

And those lyrics—yes, Orton is still obsessed with nature imagery: trees, leaves and sky, especially sky. Her voice aches and soothes over mostly melancholy themes, loneliness and doubt chief among them, and it’s easy, as she sings in “Concrete Sky,” the first single, penned with ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, “Save my soul save some for you, hold on to my soul, Feel like I’m falling / Feel like I’m falling / And there’s a concrete sky falling from the trees again / And I know now why he’s not coming round too soon...” to imagine we are outside in a verdant field with her, surrounded by forest and stars. Not afraid to dwell into sentiments deeply, Orton rarely even skims the border of becoming sappy, she always sings like she means it.

This sincerity struck me with added emphasis during “OK” (which may be titled “What You Want” or “This One’s Gonna Bruise” on the official release), a song Ryan Adams, the ex-Whiskeytown front man and current roots-rock glamour boy, wrote for Orton to sing. Her eyes closed during the chorus, “I feel bad for you / But I don’t know why / I don’t know why / ’Cause I’m dead as you,” I couldn’t help thinking that her performance of the song was far more unguarded than if sung by Adams, who would have drowned the lyrics in his own self, whereas Orton simply let her voice be their expression.

It is her voice that is the strong point of every song, even when the song is especially strong, as in “Ted’s Waltz,” when she finds her lover best in sleep—“Wipe out the sun in your eyes with that vicious sky / Wipe out the sun from your eyes ’cause some sleep to lie / See the way you are / Feel the way you move / So deep so sweet / You burn through it all”—it is her voice alone that remains crucial, take away her band and give her Blink 182 lyrics and I’d still be compelled. To contrast her with another talented Beth, Beth Gibbons of Portishead, Orton’s voice lacks Gibbon’s distorted range and mysterious tremolo, and she is more triumphant to Gibbon’s vulnerable, more earnest than ethereal, there is an exposed nerve to Orton’s lilting articulation that pierces—she is otherworldly in a more accessible yet equally rare way.

The crowd predictably reacted most to the familiar material, songs like “Pass in Time,” “Best Bit,” and “Sugar Boy”—her only forgettable song of the night, the generic I-won’t-be-your-martyr-anymore song in her repertoire. She was tireless, playing over twenty songs in a set that lasted over two hours, coming out for two separate encores, the second her solo acoustic, taking requests. She played crowd favorite “I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine” to end, but I was most moved by her new songs, many of them containing complex arrangements around simple chord structures, her “God Song”’s naked honesty singing “Pray for the strength to carry on / He’s not mine and I’ve been doing Him wrong” causing me to choke on my own jaded beliefs, and most of all the delicious, affecting “Paris Train.” I know where I’ll be at the end of July.