Portishead – Portishead

Description

Portishead is the second studio album by the English electronic trip hop/leftfield music group Portishead, originally released in 1997.

Portishead is clearly related to its predecessor, Dummy. The more evident departures of the bands 2008 third album Third and the confluence of songs from both albums on the 1998 live collection Roseland NYC Live have made it that much easier to group Dummy and Portishead together. The parallels run long and deep: breakbeats and thick bass, thoughtful guitar and even more thoughtful singer. Yet the proportions have changed.

The prevalence of bass notes onDummy created a sense of permanent suspension in liquid, as if the listener were tunneling through a heart, but with the exception of the gorgeous Undenied, Portishead showcases an act that no longer serves bass as it once did. The arrangements are drier, harder, more abrasive and more spare; air and solid are the albums leading elements. Gibbonss vocal language, likewise, has shifted: Though she always retains her composure, her tones are combative and bitter, accusatory and defiant. Her subjects are less cloaked in poetic elusiveness; she sings more frankly of concerns and troubles.

The album makes total sense, but how does it sound? One could argue that Portishead can be more admirable in theory than in practice. Created in direct opposition to the twinned principles of quick profit and easy pleasure, its a masterpiece of painful rigor. With the exception of Undenied, the albums exhilarations, though plentiful, are inseparable from its harrowing politics and embattled nature. Utleys riff on Cowboys is fit to saw through steel; Barrows beat on Elysium counts its measures with an alarming or bomb-adjacent urgency; Gibbonss voice, shorn of comforting accompaniments, is charged with a kind of grievous purity throughout, reaching heights of agony unheard onDummy.

Though the fact is obscured by the 11-year gap between albums, its certain that Portishead paved the way for the even more deeply disturbed tone of Third (their best album) as much as it marks an extension of the sonics introduced in Dummy. (via Vulture)

Where Portisheads debut, 1994s Dummy, is noirish and lush, even warm, and just as content to be lavished with attention as it is to be played as gauzy background music at a dinner party, the groups eponymous follow-up insists on being the focus of attention. If possible, the terrain is headier, the edges are sharper, and Portishead is, at times, a more arduous listen than its predecessor.

Beth Gibbons still sings her future-blues like an old torchbearer in a smoky lounge, but this time she does so as if she were cast as Billie Holidays evil doppelganger in a David Lynch film. Her voice competes with the sinister electric guitar that traces her vocal melody in Elysiumand wins.

The single All Mine, which first appears to be a happy love song (it even employs the old half-step key-change trick of so many drippy pop ballads), descends into a possessive declaration: From that cloud, number nine/Danger starts the sharp incline.

Cinema is a fitting reference point for a group that got its start by shooting and scoring a short film (1994s To Kill a Dead Man). Vintage spy movies are still an obvious influence, but theres a more futuristic sound enveloping the dusty surface noise and jazzy drum fills of Portishead. Half Day Closing and Humming have a spacey, sci-fi quality, and, like on Dummy, cinematic orchestrations (both original and sampled) underscore Gibbonss mournful laments. Seven Months starts with a rupture, the singers vitriol spilling out as if held prisoner for the duration of those titular months (How can I forget you/Disregard how I feel?), Adrian Utleys guitar seemingly bellowing up from the cavernous belly of a dungeon while Geoff Barrows barking synths stand guard like watchdogs.

Whats surprising, in retrospect, is how political Portishead isor seemingly political, since Portishead has never been as politically outspoken as, say, Moby or fellow Bristol music pioneers Massive Attack, and Gibbonss lyrics are often enigmatic at best. The cynical opening track, Cowboys, plays uncannily like a prophetic indictment of the looming Bush administration (Did you feed us tales of deceit/Conceal the tongues who need to speak/Subtle lies and a soiled coin/The truth is sold, the deal is done), while Half Day Closing was Inspired by: The United States of America, an alien-like comment on the so-called American Dream. Harder to suss out is Elysium, which, with its references to heaven (or, in the mythological Greek underworld, the place where the righteous dwell) and Crusades-old method of tarring and feathering, could very well be a pro-choice anthemor at least a condemnation of many pro-lifers hypocrisies.

Whats also notable about Portishead is not only how well written the album is, but how well performed and guitar-driven the songs are, which no doubt enamored them to rock critics at the time. Unlike many electronic and trip-hop acts, Portishead was just as spectacular livea fact best demonstrated on PNYC, the live album that followed a year laterand it was with this very promise that they sadly ventured into obscurity for a full decade.

Amid a plodding hip-hop beat, turntable scratches, and a sample from the Inspector Clouseau soundtrack (one of only two samples on the albumthe rest were original samples recorded by the group), Utley sneaks in with an incredible Rhodes solo that would go on to be an even bigger highlight on PNYC. On Undenied, narrative tension is shaped by solemn piano and a rhythmic bassline that seems to measure the passing seconds as Gibbons strains to reach notes knowingly written outside her vocal range.

Bass also plays a fundamental function in Humming: Beginning as a plucky symphonic flourish before being replaced by a more synthetic instrument by songs end, the basslines upward movementlike a helium balloon rising higher and higher into the skymirrors the singers sense of being swept away. These are the very things that set Portishead apart from their myriad disciples; theres meat on Portisheads hard, rigid bones. While other so-called trip-hop acts moved in a more accessible, trip-pop direction in the late 1990s, Portishead became stiffer, sinking more deeply into manic melodrama and the dingy recesses of the macabre. In a sense, a third studio album is essential to validate Portisheads glorious Middle Child Syndrome. (via Slant)

Label: Go! Beat, Universal
Format: 2x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, 180g
Reissued: 2017 / Original Release: 1997
Genre: Electronic
Style: Trip Hop, Downtempo, Leftfield, Female Vocals

File under: Electronic // Leftfield