Album of the Week #18: Portishead - Portishead
This is Album of the Week #19 ~ This week's album is Portishead - Portishead
Year of Release: 1997
Genre(s): Trip Hop
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 50 minutes
RYM | Listen!
Excerpt from Vulture:
The album makes total sense, but how does it sound? One could argue that Portishead can be more admirable in theory than in practice. Created in direct opposition to the twinned principles of quick profit and easy pleasure, it’s a masterpiece of painful rigor. With the exception of “Undenied,” the album’s exhilarations, though plentiful, are inseparable from its harrowing politics and embattled nature. Utley’s riff on “Cowboys” is fit to saw through steel; Barrow’s beat on “Elysium” counts its measures with an alarming or bomb-adjacent urgency; Gibbons’s voice, shorn of comforting accompaniments, is charged with a kind of grievous purity throughout, reaching heights of agony unheard on Dummy.
Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?
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It's a beautiful album that embodies the best of the "Bristol Sound" flavor of trip hop; A dead sexy mix of dour soul vocals, spy film intrigue, hip hop sampling and scratching, and oblique lyrics that smolder in the best of ways.
If anyone is interested in where the album cover came from, it's a screenshot from the rather uncomfortable music video for All Mine.
I don't really have much to say other than this is a fantastic album that's worth a listen. If you jive with it, there's a wider world of releases and artists to explore. The recently created Trip Hop Lovers channel on youtube is a great curated space to hunt around. Though you'll be hard-pressed to find a singer/songwriter as good as Beth Gibbons.
Another thing worth sharing is the live performance CD/DVD "Roseland NYC Live" that Portishead released not long after this album. It was assembled from the best takes of their performances in NYC with orchestral accompaniment and live turntablism. When I need to refill the Trip Hop tank, it's the album I usually reach for instead of the studio releases.
The strings-soaked intro/outro, live version of Strangers, and (the soul rending vocals on) Sour Times are the highlights if you don't have time for the full thing.
I don't know if you made this up or not, but its not only the most accurate genre, but the combination of those words and sounds is beautiful.
Your one sentence review was so incredibly on-point that I don't think you need to say much more! As a huge fan of this album, Portishead in particular, and Trip Hop in general, I honestly can't believe you managed to encapsulate the essence of the album so insanely concisely, while also being wonderfully poetic about it. Well done! It puts all my reviews from the various 'of the week' topics to shame.
Oh man a generation ago we were waaay into Portishead. They became the soundtrack for our whole San Francisco raver scene in like 1999. Saw them twice during that time. Amazing concerts.
I was so taken by the atmosphere their music created that I wrote a SyFy Channel pilot and TV series concept about people living in Elysium-style outer space satellites and cylinders called Habitats. Portishead was the sound of the entire story.
Hollywood had no idea what to do with this idea back then lol. I was often five years too late with my pitches but in this case I was five years too early.
I was a complete trip hop head throughout the '90's, but wanted to mention an influential, Portishead-reminiscent band of the period that seems invisible to people who compile canonical trip hop lists.
Stereolab, along with Garbage (more often binned as alt-rock), Portishead, Morcheeba, Tricky, Zero7, and some other bands primarily featured female vocalists, and it was a good contrast to the heavier industrial I was listening to.
Footnote: stylistic labels like "art rock" or "shoegaze", etc. invented to promote a particular label's sound or magazine writer's classification system don't make a great deal of sense to me.