Portishead

Essential Albums

  • Third
    Third

    Eleven years following their self-titled second album, Portishead’s Third is an inventive, challenging song cycle that never settles for easy listening. The time off was no vacation. Principal producer and writer Geoff Barrow was decidedly unhappy over the group’s comfort zone, disturbed that the ensemble’s experimental ways were so easily co-opted by others and fitted as a lifestyle soundtrack for a sophisticated, affluent class. With Third, the challenge was on to reinvent the group’s spooky trip-hop, film-noir magic as something far more extreme. “Magic Doors” and “Plastic” both clock in at the conventional three-and-a-half minute mark, yet in their compact structures the tunes cut-up and break down in unexpected jolts with beats slowed to crawls and Beth Gibbons’ eerie vocals tortured into free-fall. The minute and a half of “Deep Water” is a shockingly tame ukulele ballad with a barbershop quartet mocking Gibbons’ depressive observations, but elsewhere the emphasis is pure tension. The disruptive grooves of “Silence” set the ominous path. Songs shut down abruptly, or clang on with battered electronics (“Machine Gun”). Intense.

  • Dummy
    Dummy

    Few debuts have arrived as distinct and fully formed as Portishead’s 1994 debut, Dummy. Running at just under 50 minutes, the album’s 11 tracks are compact yet imaginatively spacious, a downtempo template for the eerie and disquieting sound that would go on to become known as trip-hop. Released amid the macho Britpop posturing of Oasis and Blur, Dummy lurched like something out of the depths. Named after a 1970s British TV drama about a deaf woman who becomes a prostitute, the record is replete with turntable scratches, shuddering drums, and scrapes of fragmented guitar, all of it anchored by vocalist Beth Gibbons’ crystalline falsetto that typically sings not of love or joy, but of “the blackness, the darkness, forever” in “Wandering Star.” When the members of Portishead first met in 1991, there were few hints as to the type of music they’d go on to make. Comprised of the 26-year-old West Country singer Gibbons, a ponytailed 19-year-old hip-hop fanatic named Geoff Barrow, and 34-year-old jazz session guitarist Adrian Utley, the trio came together at the height of the British acid rave scene to make tracks squarely aimed at the anxiety spiral of a comedown. Based in Bristol, Portishead followed in the footsteps of Massive Attack, the local purveyors of mood music. But while Massive Attack’s music tended towards heart-soaring crescendos, Portishead’s songs lived in the tension before release. Standout tracks like “Sour Times,” “Wandering Star,” and “Glory Box” lull the listener into a trance of cinematic string swells, crisp drum grooves, and Gibbons’ velvet vocals. It’s subtle, enduring work that has since become so ubiquitous it has birthed imitations from artists like Morcheeba, Mono, and Sneaker Pimps, and even led Dummy to be miscategorized as background, pacifying music. But don’t be fooled: This is a stylish album that luxuriates in discomfort—a finely wrought debut that’s as capable of soothing the listener with its warm melodies as it is of jarring them with its dark sonic palette. Dummy is a record for night-dwellers, everywhere and always.

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About Portishead

Named for a coastal town near their home base of Bristol, England, the pioneering trip-hop band Portishead created a hauntingly seductive form of electronic music. • Producer and multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow met singer Beth Gibbons in 1990 at a training for Enterprise Allowance, a government program that gave unemployed people money to start their own business. • The pair began making music together and soon added Adrian Utley, a jazz session guitarist with an impressive library of spy films. Utley and Barrow began combining influences and creating Portishead’s original sound. • The band’s landmark 1994 debut album, Dummy, reached No. 2 on the UK charts and earned the prestigious Mercury Prize. The singles “Sour Times” and “Glory Box” both went Top 20. • Portishead’s self-titled 1997 sophomore album also reached No. 2 in the UK and just missed the Top 20 in the US. The single “All Mine” became their first—and to date only—Top 10 single in the UK. • In the years that followed, Barrow moved to Australia and took a break from making music. Portishead finally returned in 2008 with Third, which reached No. 7 on the US charts and gave the band their third consecutive No. 2 placement in the UK.

ORIGIN
Bristol, England
FORMED
1991
GENRE
Electronic

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