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Stark, Dark "Portishead'

The Washington Post, Wednesday, October 1, 1997; Page C07

While boosters of British electronic pop insist that it deserves to rule today's charts, the makers of the music endeavor to guarantee that never happens.

Take, for example, Portishead. Although just as spooky as the debut albums of such fellow Bristol acts as Massive Attack and Tricky, the band's "Dummy" was an unexpected commercial success in the United States. Three years later, the quartet's new offering is "Portishead" (London), an album that's even starker and darker than its predecessor.

Although the new disc's haunted, hip-hopped lounge music sounds even eerier than the last one's, it's not a major shift. One of the most popular tracks from "Dummy," after all, was titled "Sour Times," so such dour new tracks as "Mourning Air" and "Over" are hardly unprecedented. Portishead, which is named after founder Geoff Barrow's home town, has always sounded like Julie London doing the soundtrack for a musical production of Rod Serling's "The Myth of Sisyphus."

The mainstream appeal of the band's debut was largely due to its cocktail-lounge saunter and Beth Gibbons's freezer-burned vocals. This disc's first single, "All Mine," continues the lounge act, complete with a horn section. Such retro touches are rare on the album, however. Although the band performed in New York two months ago with a 30-piece orchestra, most of "Portishead" is spare and spacey, with Gibbons's voice playing against textures that are overwhelmingly electronic. The cocktail flavor frequently comes from a single instrument, such as the piano on "Western Eyes" or the trombone on "Mourning Air."

Barrow has cited hip-hop and soundtrack music as his principal inspirations, and both are conspicuous on this album; so is the influence of pioneering '60s and '70s German and American electronic groups. ("Half Day Closing," Portishead notes, was inspired by the United States of America, presumably a reference not to the country but to the band that in 1968 released the first rock album made principally with electronic instruments.) The stripped-down sound, however, puts the hip-hop influence into high relief, especially on "Over" and "Only You."

Less evident but just as crucial is the effect of dub, the heavily reverbed, vaguely ominous Jamaican remix technique. It's dub that underlies the entire Bristol sound, and that gives the style its not entirely explicable sense of dread. Ultimately, that dread is the band's most problematic aspect. Portishead's music achieves an artful darkness, but it's impossible to tell if the gloom is profound or simply part of the packaging.