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EXPOSURE

Source: SPIN, February 1995, Vol. 10, No. 11

Uneasy Listening

Portishead's black-hearted soul stirs up a whole new genre: disque noir.

A GOOD SCARY movie score can screw up your emotions so tight that you're reduced to peering at the screen between the cracks of your fingers and flying off your seat when the psycho finally slashes the shower curtain. Portishead's music serves the same function; its debut album, Dummy (Go! Discs/London), is the sound of something horrible about to happen. Singer Beth Gibbons gasps her claustrophobic vocals amid a stillness so ominous it brings to mind Julie Harris gradually losing her marbles in The Haunting. Gibbons's grim musical environs are supplied by band members Dave McDonald, Adrian Utley, and lank-haired sound sculptor Geoff Barrow, who understates,"I don't like happy, chirpy rhythms." Even the group's most wistful song, "Sour Times," is fraught with anticipation of impending calamity, in part due to the employment of a theremin, the device the Beach Boys used to make "Good Vibrations" sound so spooky. "I'm not so keen on modern technology," remarks Barrow, "that's why a lot of our stuff sounds rough. If you polish everything up too much, it sounds stale. Like plastic music." Though Barrow claims few cinematic influences, the group has dabbled in noir via a disorienting ten-minute short called To Kill a Dead Man. "It's got us in it wandering around like cardboard cutouts," he says of the film, which is plotless and moody and still makes more sense than Stargate. "I just want people to say it's interesting, I don't want them to see it as us trying to make Pulp Fiction." The name Portishead is derived from the band's hometown outside of Bristol, England, the base of close kin Massive Attack and Neneh Cherry (whose Homebrew album Barrow engineered). "I really don't like the place," reflects Barrow. "It's a place you can go to and die."

"And that's why we named ourselves after it," says Gibbons brightly.

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