Music We Listen To, feat., Portishead
Genre: Triphop, Alternative, Experimental
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
Of course we listen to Portishead!
This band is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting bands to ever come out in my lifetime. If you don’t recall what else was happening in August 1994, take a walk with me back in time: Superunknown was only five months old, and Kurt Cobain had just killed himself four months before. Grunge was arguably past its zenith by this time, but bands and A&R folks didn’t quite know it yet. Perhaps one of the most defining Britpop records by a band called Oasis, named Definitely Maybe was just a week away from changing the sound of Alternative. Punk’s renaissance was just in its early days, with Green Day’s Dookie a only 7 months old and Rancid’s massive breakout Let’s Go a mere 2 months old, while nobody outside of Orange County had ever heard of Gwen and Co. from No Doubt.
And on the more mainstream side, Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Hold My Hand” was still sitting comfortably in the Top 10 (for you Millennials out there, “Hootie” is Darius Rucker, who you probably know because his countryfied version of “Wagon Wheel” has probably been on infinite repeat on your Spotify, and I know because the video has 225 million views on YouTube!) and The Black Crowes were just a couple months from dropping their masterful followup to 1992’s Southern Musical and Harmony Companion, with the scandalous cover art ripped straight from the pages of Hustler Magazine, called Amorica.
The aesthetic of music was changing rapidly in mid-1994. Into this mix, Portishead burst out with their debut album, Dummy, on my 18th Birthday (thank you, Portishead!). This record was just like nothing else released at this time. I dare say, Americans did not understand it. I certainly didn’t get it.
When my friends and I would watch MTV, and “Sour Times” would come on, we’d hear Beth Gibbons’ spooky moaning, like a frustrated ghost crying about how “Nobody loves…” her, and it’s true that we would laugh, in true Beavis and Butthead fashion. “Nobody loves her because this sh-t is weird…” No, we did not understand it at all.
In November of 1994, I ate my first tab of LSD.
And then, I understood Portishead.
This music was so rich, and layered. It was haunting. I read all over the place about how Portishead evoked the crime drama aesthetic of the 60s and 70s: this would be the kind of music used to score some noir television program. I guess I can see that, maybe. But the music was atmospheric. Dummy was far more along these lines than their later records. It was like jazz set to a hip hop beat. The music was grim and scary. It was full of self-loathing and despair. It was a very very dark record. And in its darkness, it was very sonically beautiful.
The best track from Dummy was an early cut called “Wandering Stars”. This song has a massive bass line that any MC could easily rap over, and record scratching, as well as ambient orchestral music backing it. But Beth Gibbons, who has a beautiful voice when she isn’t grinding it, the way a knuckle would grind into an eye during a desperate fight, sings a song of desolate obliteration: “Wandering Stars, for whom it is reserved, the blackness, the darkness forever.” Man, it almost would make a man want to just kill himself.
But I have always loved this about Portishead: They are so incredibly bleak in their music. They never sing happy songs. Like never. Whenever I get into a melancholy funk about the state of my life, I play Portishead. And I get to listen to expert musicians who perpetually seem to be having the absolutely worst day of their entire lives, of anyone’s entire lives. Their love songs are all about frustrated longing, rather than fulfillment. Their non-love songs are just like Wandering Stars: they really plumb the depths of misery and suffering and loneliness and grief. Portishead is like a purgative: it helps me get whatever is eating my own soul out. Because I know that no matter how bad my worst day is, it probably isn’t as bad as Portishead’s best day. And I feel a little better. I’m sure they are delightful people, outside the band. But their music is the opposite of delightful, and as such, is quite wonderful.
Dummy’s follow-up is affectionately called by those who love it Portishead- Portishead (not “S/T” as most eponymous albums are called, or known by the predominant color of their album art, like Weezer’s “Blue Album” or Rancid’s “Skull Cover” or “Gun Cover”.) 1997’s Portishead Portishead is a different sort of animal all together. It is drug music, pure and simple. This record is the exemplar of triphop for all the ages: everything else in this genre is, at best, as good or worse an attempt at copying what Portishead does on this record.
The first time I heard three dimensional recorded music was on Portishead Portishead. I mean, there were layers of sound upon layers of sound, and some faded, or rather phased from one side to the other, and further away and then closer in. In the song “Half Day Closing” you can literally hear some guy counting to 35 behind the song, quite inexplicably, and almost inaudibly, but you can hear it with good earphones, and if you know it’s there.
If you want to hear it, listen at around 1:34 in the song, where Gibbons sings “Don’t pay the way” in the second verse. You can clearly hear a guys’s voice say “6”. And then, just before she says “Underneath”, in time with the beat, you can hear him say “7”. Once you know what he sounds like, you will NEVER be able to unhear that. It’s not a mistake and it’s not random: that is in there intentionally.
This record was an engineering masterpiece, and just blew all of its contemporaries away. In my opinion, it is far superior to Dummy: As good as their debut record was, Portishead Portishead makes Dummy look like a proof-of-concept. Yes, it’s every bit as dark and dismal as Dummy but almost in a more hellish way, like the soul of the band is trapped in a horrible plane of oblivion. The way they reproduce this sense in music is simply astounding.
For their next record, 1998's Roseland NYC, they did it live, and you better bet they did it far better than they ever did on record, because it showed that the technical master craftsmanship of their sound was not some studio production trick. They actually sounded like that live, with a full orchestra playing with them. Roseland NYC was not as clean as the highly produced predecessors, and live it always sounded slightly warmer than the wind blasted tones of their studio albums. You can’t really get as evil as you want when you have to do it in front of hundreds of people who just love your music and cheer wildly when you are trying to tell them that all has been lost forever. But it is no less excellent. This was before the days of auto-tune, and “Hit Me Baby One More Time” was the biggest song in the world. Portishead was an antidote to that saccharin: A reminder that lurking around every mouseketeer’s feet was a dark dark shadow which screamed “You cannot outrun the darkness.”
Then Portishead took a recording hiatus for like 10 years. And then, out of nowhere, came their critical masterpiece, 2008’s Third. This record was lauded as “career defining”, though it was more experimental, I think than straight triphop — triphop had basically disappeared from the lexicon at about the same time that rap-rock did, though for different reasons, as triphop folded into the electronica and rave scene in the early 2000s, but rap-rock just died due to it being fully occupied by real low class individuals and rotten musicians. Portishead apparently had abandoned it completely by 2008.
Portishead still kept some of the noir grit of their earlier records, but this record was certainly more mature. Their percussion is featured in this record more than anything, I think. Several of the songs feature very innovative sounding drums, including most notably “Machine Gun” which changes a drum into the slowest firing machine gun ever. But the amazing things about these percussion focused songs is that they all eventually turn into rock tunes, which I found surprising. Orchestration is rarer, record scratching and hip hop rhythms are sidelined in favor of staccato percussion and more traditional rock instrumentation. Beth Gibbon’s voice is instantly recognizable, despite the nearly 20 years of singing this music professionally, and apparently lots of smoking. But her themes aren’t so dark as they were on Portishead’s earlier records. They focus more on resignation than despair. And in resignation, there is something positive. One song, an upbeat electronica jam is even called “We Carry On”.
It’s like Portishead decided that they had complained for long enough. The only real song, in my opinion, of hard dread comes in the track “Deep Waters” which literally terrified me when I first heard it, for my own reason. The rest of the record is just musical virtuosity that apparently is no longer in vogue in music anymore.
It is my hope that Portishead is not finished. While the band did cover ABBA’s “SOS”, in a VERY creepy fashion (doing it perfect Portishead justice as the Yin to ABBA’s inadvertent Yang), I imagine that Portishead has at least one more record in them before retiring. Then again, if I find out that they they are done for good and am saddened, I can always play Dummy and just know that my worst day will never ever be as bad as the lady in “Glory Box” who begs an uninterested lover to just give her a reason to “be a woman.” That sucks for her, but I will know, I will be ok.
Portishead is music we listen to, because it is excellent. I hope you enjoy it and, whatever you do, I encourage you to not bathe in it, unless you know what you are doing.
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
