If you set your clock by the Grammy awards like I do, you know that this here is the Year of the Woman in the music industry. It said so in Billboard, so it must be true. The problem with proclamations like these is that the people announcing them are usually old, conservative and less attuned to talent than your average Budweiser frog.

What we really saw in this year's Grammy voting was a sexist industry overcorrecting for past wrongs. Lauryn Hill is a promising musician, but she needs to find at least one lyric that's not patronizing and dull. Sheryl Crow knows her blues as well as any jilted thirty- something, but she's too banal for her own good. Madonna's eccentricities are no longer amusing, let alone provocative-- she enlisted William Orbit, signature bleeps and all, for her latest shot at latex immortality. But Beth Orton did it a year earlier on a superior album, Trailer Park, that wasn't as immortal as it was timeless. After that masterwork of translucent folk, you knew there was less room for disappointment on the elegantly awkward Brit's follow-up than the typical Beck album. Central Reservation lives up to expectations.

At its heart, Central Reservation differs little from Trailer Park, but the difference is in the detail: the Beth we get this time out is confident, if not assertive. When she sings of love pensively on "Love Like Laughter" and painfully on "Stolen Car" (both of which feature Ben Harper on electric guitar), she's more reflective than naive. When she quivers through candlelit crooners like "Sweetest Decline" (with Dr. John on piano) and the vibrant "Pass In Time" (with Terry Callier filling out the chorus), she's singing London soul like only Dusty Springfield has before her. When she teams up with Everything But the Girl's Ben Watt for two club tracks ("Stars All Seem to Weep" and the album's title cut), it's a natural fit because Orton's subtle songcraft is universal.

It's a more mature Beth we get on Central Reservation, one who can make you envy her heartbreak ("Blood Red River") and her joy ("Feel to Believe") in equal measure. Her peers could learn from her, but chances are they won't, because music this real can't be taught.

-Shan Fowler