Articles

Puncture

Spring 1995, No. 32

Portishead
Dummy
(Go! Discs/London)

This Bristol, England band consist of studio wunderkind/multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow and vocalist Beth Gibbons, supplemented by numerous session musicians and a host of elegantly plied (and annotated) samples. With Barrow (a famed remixer of material as diverse as Primal Scream and Gravediggaz) at the console, Dummy comes on like a pure epiphany of studio technology. Calling this record slick is apt enough (that's what it aims to be); calling it smooth is exact. Portishead present the listener with spare, chilling soundscapes driven by mellow hiphop beats and the soul-inflected vocals of Gibbons. The duo's work astutely creates a shimmering and suggestive atmosphere that confers a near-cinematic quality; too dramatically charged to be just a soundtrack, these numbers work like a kind of sonic cinema.

Dummy pulls back the curtain with the slow, sinuous "Mysterons", a song that could be mood music for a robotic film noir: its forward thrust is conferred by a mellow dance throb minimally fleshed out with guitar, Rhodes keyboard, and wispy but artful theramin figures. "Sour Times" concocts sultry atmospherics via a programmed hiphop shuffle, a healthy dose of hazy '60s-detective-show guitar tremolo, and a recurrent, shivering sample culled from the "Mission Impossible" soundtrack; Gibbons graces this with her most provocatively smoky performance.

With "It Could Be Sweet", things turn soulful. Amid a swaying organ line and canned, narcotically muted drums, Gibbons comes on like a blue-eyed, sugar-coated version of Sade (without that singer's oft-tedious faux-jazz trappings). All told, a dazzling debut.

Phil Pegg

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