Portishead

Bristol's Portishead Bristol were the leaders, and possibly the founders, of the "trip-hop" movement. However, their style is just the vehicle, in fact the content is a depressed yearning for peace  of  damned souls wandering in the urban neurosis days.  Their songs aren't just songs, but the sound tracks of mini "sleepwalkers movies" in which the dreaming leading actor is always defeated .

Portishead is the Bristol area where Geoff Barrow grew up.  Being a fan of Massive Attack he started composing and recording hip hop at home, until Neneh Cherry bought   his "Sunday". Barrow  became = a production assistant and met the future singer  Beth Gibbons in one of the studios he was working in, a frail and shy woman who found out to know how to give voice to the tradition of soul.  Dave McDonald (sound engineer) and Adrian Utley (guitarist) joined them. The rest was a natural consequence  coming from   the mixture of these four personalities and of their music backgrounds.

The album Dummy (Go Disc, 1994) is a collection of spooky and funereal songs that update the insights of musicians such as Cowboy Junkies and Angelo Badalamenti, Sade and Al Green, Young Marble Giants and Barry Adamson to modern technology. The singer's disconsolate laments flow over a sequence of equally apathetic events. Indeed, it is Beth Gibbons' passionate and vaguely soulful singing that complements the subdued arrangements in a suggestive way, inspired by the "junk" culture of cocktail lounges, James Bond films and film noir. Troubled by small dissonances, electronic whimpers, mimetic samples and turntable scratches, by syncopated and complex beats, and by a constant rumble of almost dub bass, these chamber arrangements constitute the real purpose of music, which is one atmosphere. yet to be harmony. Some songs are pure abstraction: Mysterons has the caliber of the bolero, but the martial warble of Gibbons are softened by a languid and peaceful music, which never rears, which crawls in an undergrowth of guitar chimes, of electronic effusions. Roads is pure texture, as notes fluctuate and flicker away, as strings rise and the guitar wails, until an orchestral themes overflows with a melodramatic effect. Biscuit is pure rhythm, a fusion of a syncopated funk-jazz lingo, a limping blues stomp, a liquid keyboards-driven jazz-rock, and a slow-motion hip-hop beat. The solemn lied of Wandering Star is underscored by a soundscape of electronic bubbles and turntable scratches, besides the usual convoluted beat and dub bass. Sour Times instead opens the parade of majestic melodies, in this case a sensual and fatal phrasing punctuated by a guitar twang and a melancholy orchestral motif (which together recall the soundtracks of the 60s). The retro style of this song Strangers is a sophisticated mechanism: immersed in a swamp of viscous rhythm a dark soul song unfolds (presented in a sampling without music as if it were an old record), but the theme is continually interrupted by digressions (a limping, electronic, echoes) while the rhythm resumes powerful and pierced by an intermittent signal. Stylistic Babel is more intricate than it seems: It's A Fire makes use of the noble gospel phrases of the organ, while Numb leverages the ticking of reggae and an African drum and Glory Box echoes Bessie Smith's classic blues. Almost all sounds are studio artifacts, brushed until they lose their identity and become pure sound-recording essays.

But the arrangements fail on "Portishead" (Go Beat, 1997), which is a much more regular album, or at least not as transgressive as "Dummy". Gibbons does not find the right balance,  not with the hysterical  lullaby of  Cowboys nor with the lamentation in falsetto of Undenied, nor with the strident notes of Seven Months.
Leaving behind the oneiric dream,  the album expresses a vigorous desperation like  Billie Holliday's works, but without her vocal gift.
At the end what remains is just a patina of delicate jazz-blues sounds which can be found in All Mine and Mourning Air,  in the soul - jazz of Western Eyes and  in the slow blues of Over, songs that the lovers of this gender have been listening  to  a 100 times.
The marks of suffering which run through their first songs can here be found only in Humming -   "Greek tragedy" trilling and requiem keyboards - and maybe in the Only You poem   made of   disconsolate actings,  samplings and impetuous scratches  .
Half Day Closing too, which is maybe the most spectral song because of the different guitar effects, percussion patterns, bass guitar phrases, song distortions and which draws inspiration from the United States of America goes on at a schizophrenic step. I would say that these  are rather neurotic then psychedelic sounds.
Between "Portishead" and "Dummy" there is a  shady but substant= ial difference: there is a bigger use of real instruments (even if sampling and electronics are still dominant), a greater respect for the hip hop canons  - in particular the kind of  Wu-Tang Chang and Fugees -   and a maniac and recluse passion in reducing the sound of  record players, a rather   technical  then an artistic passion.
This album shows us that Barrow and Gibbons had an intelligent idea, but not more then an idea.

As Massive Attack did before them, Portishead took the hip-hop language  and  move it away from the ghettos where it was born,  adapting it - with jazz fragments,  muzac and film noir cliches  to the moral decadency of white neighborhoods.

Portishead's guitarist Adrian Utley released Warminster (Ochre, 1999), an EP that harks back to the heydays of electronic music (e.g., Morton Subotnick).

Beth Gibbons has released Out Of Season (Go Beat, 2002), a collaboration with "Rustin Man" (Paul Webb of O'Rang), a collection of nostalgic tributes to easy-listening (Tom The Model, Drake, Romance) and late-night jazz (Show). Indulging in orchestrations of brass, strings, reeds, keyboards, guitars, the duo rarely masters the art of the ethereal and the melancholy (Mysteries, Funny Time of Year) that Portishead was so good at. Geoff Barrow was the real soul of Portishead's early albums.

Portishead's III (Mercury, 2008), their first album in eleven years, recorded between 2005 and 2007, hardly repeated their stylistic mantra. Only Silence (violin whistles, loping breakbeat, casual guitar twang, tempo shift, agonizing croon) and Hunter (feeble litany, alien noises, sleepy waltzing rhythm) replicate the mood of their original trip-hop (and even these do not bother with their trademark beats). They rank also among the weakest songs of the album.
Elsewhere Gibbons' voice, admittedly the most recognizable element of their sound, has to compete with an arsenal of electronic and digital effects that belong to the canons of both industrial music and progressive-rock in Nylon Smile (frenzied thin polyrhythm, exotic guitar notes, jazzy vocals), and especially Machine Gun, an electronic bombardment of beats on a tapestry of renaissance-style chanting. The gem of the album is the tribal atonal feast We Carry On, worthy of Suicide. The sparse but harsh musical setting crafts expressionist kammerspiels such as Plastic (with the refrain replaced by the act of screaming against walls of noise) and the seven-minute Small, whispered like a fairy tale in between detours of gothic martial organ. By comparison, the crystalline and acoustic The Rip is a Donovan-ian lullaby (even though after two minutes it transforms into a synth-pop ballet). Magic Doors is the only regular song, and sounds out of context. The arrangements are the exact opposite of "lush". A sense of emptiness "fills" the suspended atmosphere of the album.

Portishead's Geoff Barrow launched the post-rock project Beak> with Beak> (2009), recorded live with no overdubs but later edited to insert arrangements. A more elegant atmospheric post-rock aesthetic permeated Beak II (Invada, 2012). Barrow also teamed up with Ben Salisbury to score the imaginary movie soundtrack Drokk - Music Inspired By Mega-City One (Invada, 2012) in the vein of the then fashionable John Carpenter soundtracks.

Portishead seemed to start a new career with the disco-oriented Chase The Tear (2011).