Articles

Breathy Sophisticates Romancing in the Ruins

The New York Times, May 4, 1995

In Portishead's music, mood is everything. On it's album, "Dummy" (London), Beth Gibbons's breathy voice floats above samples of film scores and old songs with an undertow of rhythm, suggesting tentative romance amid the ruins of yesterday's pop. When the group performed at the Supper Club on Sunday night, it strove to create just the right tone of bleary sophistication; the weather co-operated with rain.

Although the show was sold out, tables and chairs were set up, night-club style. As lightshow blobs oozed on a screen, a disk jockey serenaded early arrivals with lounge and sound-track music, including some of the sources for Portishead's samples. For his last segment, he switched to louder, more current dance rhythms, with slow-thumping bass lines. After a wordless, 10-minute film, "To Kill a Dead Man" - shards of plot from a suspense movie - the group appeared onstage, dimly lit and unassuming.

As a six-member band, Portishead's task was to recapture the fragile tone of its album, and it came suprisingly close. Ms. Gibbons became a fin-de-siecle lounge singer, plaintive and breathy as she delivered lines like "You abandoned me, lost forever" or "The blackness, the darkness forever," and toying with a jazz singer's nasality when she revealed "I've been a temptress."

The band supported her with Adrian Utley's fuzz-toned of echoey guitar lines (akin to Ennio Morricone's 1960's film scores) and John Bagott's spongy keyboard chords, over Clive Deamer's steadfast drum-beats; Geoff Barrows, who writes the songs with Ms. Gibbons and Mr. Utley, added squeky, dissonant record-scratching from his turn tables. In new song, "Over," the band ventured a fairly converntional rock climax, complete with solid chords behind the chorus: "You've taken me over." But for most of the set, Portishead kept its music hollow and impassive, acheiving it's paradoxical mixture of ardor and wary detachment.

Then came the finale of a set that lasted barely an hour. It was Portishead's hit, "Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)," revised and damaged. The band played it with Pink Floyd-like echo and pomposity; it didn't use the "Mission Impossible" sample that made the recording distincitive, and omitted a crucial chord from the chorus. At the end, the song shifted to an uptempo garage-band stomp, with Ms, Gibbons wailing "Nobody loves me!" When Portishead started kicking and shouting, it became just another rock band.

Jon Pareles

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Breathy Sophisticates Romancing in the Ruins