Articles

ON THE RECORD / Portishead Progresses By Dipping Into the Past

Newsday, October 12, 1997, pp D33.

Portishead
`Portishead'
(Go!Beat/London)

FOLLOWING UP A successful album is rarely easy. When that album is your first and launched a whole new sound, the task becomes daunting.

For Portishead, whose 1994 debut "Dummy" marked the breakthrough of "trip-hop" - a subgenre of languid break-beats and dub reggae studio techniques usually set to female vocals - the pressure provoked a crisis. While acts such as Olive and Sneaker Pimps capitalized on the band's absence, Portishead hit a creative brick wall, scrapping 18 months' work and starting over again.

Fortunately, the sophomore album since recorded delivers on all fronts. It's unmistakably the sound of Portishead, so it is clearly a progression. Founder Geoff Barrow and his studio cohorts Dave McDonald and Adrian Utley realized you sometimes have to go forward to go backward. Determined to re-create beloved sounds of the past without merely sampling them, they recorded their own drum loops, orchestral arrangements, keyboard motifs and even vocals, pressed them on to vinyl, physically dirtied the records, then reintroduced the now heavily scratched music back into the mix.

The result is a delicately mutated hip-hop film noir. Rarely have analog and digital technologies been better married.

None of this meticulous doctoring would matter without enigmatic singer Beth Gibbons, whose beautifully haunting delivery made "Dummy" so remarkable. On "Portishead" she is more vampish and moody, sinisterly like Eartha Kitt on "Cowboys," emitting a lengthy, high-pitched scream to get her message across on "Half Day Closing."

That message proves less elastic than her vocal range. "We suffer every day, what is it for?" she asks on "Only You." "This uncertainty is taking me over," she complains on "Over." Portishead willingly dives into the darker depths of the human soul, but with Gibbons contributing such raw emotion the finished result is more a cleansing than a drowning.

TONY FLETCHER
Tony Fletcher is a free-lance writer

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