There’s a strange dissonance between Beth Gibbons’s shy physical presence and that voice—enormous and unignorable. At the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles last night, the Portishead singer held back from the glare of the roughly 2,000-person audience, standing mid-stage and often shrouded in darkness while her six band members were bathed in light. She didn’t bother with any chitchat, even a hello, letting the songs—most of them from her first entirely solo album, Lives Outgrown—speak for themselves.

Which is just as well, as dissonance suits Gibbons. Her vocals seem summoned as much by spirits as the vibration of muscle tissue in the larynx. From her ethereal pleas of desire and despair floating over the cinematic trip-hop of Portishead’s 1994 debut, Dummy, to her naked introspection on the more earthbound Out of Season, her 2003 collaborative album with Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb (a.k.