Portishead - Portishead
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Free Music Notes for Portishead
Free Music Review: Trip-hop noir
Hit: 4 Stars
Portishead created a unique sound in their debut "Dummy," combining smoky jazz and trip-hop. So an equally good follow-up was a pretty tall order. Enter the self-titled "Portishead," which ups the eerie noir feel while not abandoning the cool electronic edge. In the months before their return, it seems appropriate to revisit their older material.
"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," Beth Gibbons intones, sounding like a slightly gleeful robot. That sets the tone for "Portishead," giving it a darker tone than its predecessor -- darker songs, darker vocals, darker music.
The jazz overtones are still there, bubbling up in songs like the distant "Over" and "Seven Months," which sounds strangely like fellow trip-hop artist Emiliana Torrini. Only the downtempo "Over" and softly poppy "Western Eyes" break from this cooler sound, sounding warm and unaltered. The rest of the album is a different story.
Somehow it adds to the noir atmosphere to have darker, colder sounds woven in with the jazzy trip-hop. "Humming" includes a strange background beat that sounds exactly as you would imagine a UFO. This dark, experimental edge makes it a bit harder to get into than their debut album, but when you do get into it, it's almost frighteningly intense.
The jazzy percussion is one of the first things you notice about this, paired with horns and thick synth. It's surprisingly heady to listen to. Also cold and distant -- which seems appropriate, since the simple lyrics focus on loneliness, melancholy, sadness and loss ("Why should I forgive you,/After all that I've seen,/Quietly whisper,/When my heart wants to scream?").
Beth Gibbons plays around with her vocals this time around -- while Gibbons's voice is normally very pretty, in a few songs she twists it into creepy monotones. It's a bit jarring at first, compared to her usual melodic singing, but it suits the darker songs here. The filtered, eerie intonations in "Cowboys" are downright spine-chilling.
Portishead, presently working on their long-awaited third album, made a triumphant second album. While not as easily accessible as their debut, it's definitely an entrancing experience.
Free Music Review: Cool Jazzy Musique-Noir
Hit: 5 Stars
Portishead is classic musique-noir album that is beyond description. Its hauntingly fractured beats with "loungey" inspiration and Gibbon's emotive vocals which range from despair to mocking to exhilaration form into one of the most unique sounds. Though arguably theatrical at times, this is an album that has and will continue to amaze. I was a casual listener to "Dummy", Portishead's first, but upon buying this album in 1998 I was in rapture: this music is moving. Sounding like a 1940's nightclub or 1960's lounge at times and then quickly moving to sounds that sound like a SoHo art club and then switching to a mood like that 4 AM telephone call with some girl who is just too close to the edge, the sheer range and feel of this album is fantastic.
One thing that is terrific about this album is that it can be played the whole way through making it a great soundtrack to a cool party or a long drive to nowhere. Its jazzy smooth yet jarring sound is good morning noon and night. If you don't own this album yet you are years late but don't worry, its not dated and it will provide great enjoyment for years to come.
-- Ted Murena
Free Music Review: Smoky
Hit: 5 Stars
If you were sitting on a fuzzy carpet, in a smoke filled room, with your 20-something ironic friends, chatting about topics that seem important to your "faded", at the moment, selves...This would be appropriate background music.
Essential lounging music. :-)
Patient verses, rifts, and samples are what this CD is all about.
Every note seems to have been placed exactly where it needs to be on each track...And Beth's voice is fragile thing seemingly on the cusp of being shattered into a million pieces.
If you like trip-hop, you (probably already own) will dig this.
Free Music Review: Supremely spooky
Hit: 5 Stars
This is a masterpiece of haunting, cinematic, ghostly, sexy 007-horn blasts and theremins. Beth Gibbons sings as if she's on the cusp of expiration, all sounding so perfect.Free Music Review: Deliciously Dark, Yet Hauntingly Sweet
Hit: 5 Stars
I feel quite the gauche and obscure little gothette, but I only just happened upon this group some six months ago. It is a good thing I suppose that I've always been a touch promiscuous in light of music, and mind you I have yet to find anything too clashing or contradistinct so as to elude my interest - I might not have found them beneath all the plastic, cookie-cutter cutouts strangling modern radio.
I am so deeply impressed with this album. It is dark, melancholy, a shade morose and gloomy, but also poignantly soft, subtle and all around silky-sweet. It is almost, dare I say, delicate. I've heard tell of this album being described as exuding a mellow, yet piquantly moody, sci-fi aura. I couldn't agree more - it bleeds eerie and alien black, a delish compliment to any morbid, macabre mind, but it also endears itself quite seductively to the hopeless romantic with a weeping, prettily polished forties feel ... almost jazzy at times. Or, at least that is the impression I was left with.
Beth is a fabulous compliment juxtaposed with the beautifully heady, brooding backdrop of crisp percussion, retro brass and writhing tempo. It isn't often, sad to say, that we are appreciated so original and unique an eloquence, but when we are, it leaves quite the imprint indeed. It is positively incomprehensible how natural a match she is to this music. Sheer brilliance.
It is impossible finding words befitting of this album. It is so many things, but the one thing it is not is dull. It is bewitchingly intelligent and a salad bar for the emotions - it is utterly soul-shattering. It is a little more strange then you're used to, but it is a good kind of strange, you know ... the kind of strange that leaves you dazed and breathless, curiously asking yourself a lot of those little nothings you might have been too scared to ask before.