Maybe there's no way this album could have succeeded. Beth Orton's 1997 solo debut, Trailer Park, was one of those opening salvos that some artists spend their entire careers trying to live up to, with each succeeding release smelling more strongly of anti-climax. (Ask Tracy Chapman about the joys of following up a critically praised debut.) Trailer Park deserved the praise lavished upon it: it was an inspired fusion of trip-hop and traditional folk, topped off with the most delectable voice to come out of England in many a year. So maybe any follow-up, no matter how well-made, would have seemed conservative and ordinary in comparison.

Or maybe Central Reservation, Beth Orton's eagerly-awaited follow-up to Trailer Park, is an ordinary, conservative album, comprised of hit-or-miss songs presented with a bare minimum of ingenuity or freshness. The album meanders along, its thin songs stretched over arrangements that are several sizes too big, and flaccid atmospherics are increasingly offered in lieu of actual substance. It's not as though she doesn't try to have something to say; you can feel her lyrics grasping for edginess, and many of her song titles--"Stolen Car," "Stars All Seem to Weep," "Blood Red River," "Devil's Song"--betray a forced angst that even Alanis Morissette has largely outgrown by now. Orton's heart isn't really in many of these songs; they seem to have been written to fill an idle afternoon rather than to satisfy any kind of creative need. Is Orton turning into England's answer to Sheryl Crow?

No, thank heavens; things aren't yet that bad. Even an ordinary and conservative Beth Orton is better than a great deal of today's current crop of female sort-of-folk writer/performers--she could take Jewel in three rounds flat and still have enough juice left to finish off Lisa Loeb--and Central Reservation is not without its pleasures. Skip past the first track, "Stolen Car," an overlong mid-tempo rumination about the return of an old flame (or something), and you come to "The Sweetest Decline," a warm and summery soft-jazz idyll in which the singer comes to terms with opportunities lost: "What's the use in regrets?/They're just things we haven't done yet." "So Much More" is a starkly-arranged ballad (the first of many, as it turns out) that, like most of Orton's best work, teases your subconscious with meanings too diffuse to articulate; you know you like the song but you'd be hard pressed to say what it means or what it's about. She does this not through her lyrics (as Dylan and his imitators did) but through her voice, which can wrap a line in so many melancholy shades of meaning it's a little astonishing. You will probably never hear anyone cover a Beth Orton song--the best part of the music isn't on the page.

That becomes manifestly apparent on the album's title track, a song so good it appears twice, midway through the album and in remixed form at the end. Here the singer, still drunk with memories of last night's romantic encounter, dissects her impressions of the morning after with thrilling clarity and power:

And I can still smell you on my fingers
And taste you on my breath
Stepping through brilliant shades
Of the color you bring
This time, this time, this time
Is whatever I want it to mean

Ben Watt-engineered remix is good, but the "original" version is the album's standout track, its plaintive voice-and-guitar arrangement providing a perfect opportunity for Orton to flex her interpretive muscles. You can hear the ghost of this song in every other ballad on the album; "So Much More" and "Feel to Believe" and "Devil's Song" all pare the instrumentation down to a thumbnail and crank up the echo, and all ultimately reveal how powerful "Central Reservation" is by comparison.

Again, it's not as though those other songs are bad per se. "Feel to Believe" is sung with considerable fire, "Stars All Seem to Weep" is enjoyable despite its high school lit-mag title, and "Pass in Time" remains listenable throughout most of its interminable seven-minute-plus running time. In fact, this couldn't properly be termed a bad album. A disappointing album perhaps, though some would surely remark on the gross unfairness of judging artists against their previous work. Let me tell you a secret: most of the time, artists want you to judge them by their previous work. They want you to walk past their new album on the record rack, an album of which you may not have heard a single note, and think to yourself, "Well, her last one was pretty good..."

Beth Orton's last album was more than pretty good. This one isn't, and if I come across as excessively harsh, it's only because I know how good it could've been.